Take it a step further though. While a literate population is better off than an illiterate one, literacy is simply one tool. This reminds me of this old 'state of being' stages of realization.
We could do something similar for poverty, people in need of aid.
Level 1: Needs food, water, shelter - At more or less immediate risk of death. Level 2: Ignorant, subsidence level existence - The farmers in China, for example, who live much as their ancestors 5k years ago did. Illiteracy, superstition rampant. Level 3: Has basic knowledge, but needs more. Equipment, training in more specific areas, etc... They might be literate, but don't have anything to take advantage of that.
Until an area gets beyond level 3, they aren't necessarily self-sustaining. Sure as heck can't help others out.
OLPC would be aid for level 3, maybe phasing into level 2.
but the continent needs basic literacy, which is achievable with paper, pencils, a schoolroom, and a teacher.
Many areas have basic literacy, but we need to go beyond that. Teachers get expensive. At $200/computer, you could provide five to a remote village for a mere $1k, which is still less than what I'd expect it to cost to provide a cut-rate teacher with basic supplies there. With the proper programs, the computers become the teachers. Remote teaching, etc...
That's why you'd want to build it using the cheapest parts possible; keeping it from being worth much rendered down. Proprietary parts could help as well.
You just have to make is so that breaking parts down is worth less than what it takes to render them down and transport to somewhere there's money to purchase them.
Keeping it modular so villages can salvage in the field wouldn't be bad.
Yes people are still starving but it is less than it has been before and the reason for hunger is almost always political, economic, or weather related. Much of the human reasons for keeping people hungry are dealt with when you educate and empower the population.
Today I'd even knock out the 'weather related'. The USA produces enough food by itself to feed the world, much of the problem of starving people is transportation - and politics blocking the transportation.
It's very much a 'give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him how to fish and he eats for life'.
Provide a subsidence farmer, even in the form of loans, a tractor, miscellaneous equipment and supplies, and the training how to use it and you'll have somebody who isn't a subsidence farmer anymore. He can produce enough food to pay off his loans as well as free up hundreds of other subsidence farmers to do things like work in the tractor/fertilizer factories, bicycle factories, and everything else that a developed economy needs.
With food aid I've seen unfortunate consequences: Local farmers are driven out of business*, women continue to have babies, and you end up with a population explosion of people who still can't take care of themselves. IE the food aid makes the problem *worse*. In at least one case very much worse - the food aid allowed a warlord to continue his campaign against the farmers who's farms he'd been burning.
I'd much rather concentrate on enabling people to take care of themselves. Provide equipment, training, and the security needed for them to work if necessary**.
Unfortunately, this is at least one order of magnitude more expensive than simply providing food. I'm of the opinion that it'd be better to do this, even if you can't feed everybody as a result of the diverted resources. The idea is that after doing this for ten years you don't need to provide food aid anymore except for short term disasters like a tsunami. Unlike current situations like with locations in Africa - which has needed food aid for decades.
*US product can easily be superior than what a 3rd world farmer can produce, and you can't beat 'free'. **Like the current situation in the middle east, work on training up and equipping local defense forces, both military and police. That way you don't have to provide security forever.
Exactly - There's two components to the cost of a book: Physical - printing, binding, shipping all cost money. The second is Royalties/profit. For textbooks, the second is usually larger than the first.
For developing nations, It's not like we're really forced to use fully up to date math textbooks with their $$$ going to a pool of authors/publisher.
I figure they can come up with either some public domain books, get some authors to agree to reduced/group royalties, etc...
Maybe there also should be a fingerprint reader so that the rightful owner can "brick" the thing if it is taken under duress
I'd be careful about that. Your suggestion has two problems as I see it: You need to perform an action to disable it, which muggers are unlikely to allow you to do, and a thief will try to get it without you realizing it. The second is that there's been at least one case where they ended up taking the guy's finger. Sure, it was a car rather than something as mere as a ebook reader - but people HAVE died for $20(and less!) before.
So what you want is an activation system - where you need to reactivate it via some means whenever you turn it on or wake it up from sleep mode.
But, as for the subscription service, that would negate bricking, unless a bricking feature wipes out the account by custom selection.
This would be easy actually. Think of something like a cell phone. When it's stolen, they know what the serial number of your phone is. They distribute some update, and suddenly the phone not only doesn't work, you also can't just stick a new chip in it. If you recover the phone, as the owner you'd be able to authorize it's reactivation.
This, at least theoretically, would reduce cellphone theft as people know that they only have a few hours before it'll stop working, permantently. If they try to sell it, they'll have some trouble from the 'I'm stolen!' display on the screen.
As for your account, you buy/legally aquire a new reader and add it to your account and start redownloading your books to it.
I was responding to the parent's suggestion of tying the DRM to the machine, and using that when you purchase an ebook.
Still, I'm wary of services like iTunes and other DRM encumbered services; it reduces interoperability. It might take a little work, but I shouldn't have much trouble getting webscription ebooks or mp3's into any player. Not so with something with DRM, and I don't want to end up having to have a dozen different accounts with various publishers, or even being that tightly tied to a given distributer like amazon.
At least with webscription, if I get sufficiently irked with them I can download all my books and throw them on a DVD*
I can't just export my media purchases from amazon to webscriptions to iTunes to Steam to etc... (yes, I know I'm mixing media types).
*Now that's scary, I have so many of them they won't fit onto a CD. Though a DVD will have plenty of room, even keeping both compressed and uncompressed versions.
I own hundreds of ebooks. I own many more physical books. I read frequently, however, I've only read the ebooks on a computer so far. None of the readers has caught my eye enough to make me take the plunge.
For one thing, I'm not going to splurge $400 on a reader I've never seen or touched.
Now, cut the price in half, double the memory, cut the screen change time from.75 seconds to.25, and increase compatibility with various formats... This is all stuff that's happened in the computer industry, so I don't think that it's unreasonable.
Then it'd make sense and I'd have my card out.
Of course, I do travel for extended periods of time with limited luggage capacity - I'd love be able to haul a substantial portion of my library on a device smaller than my laptop, with better lifespan and long term readability than said laptop.
where the publisher simply encrypts a book for your particular device
What happens when an accident occurs and you break the thing, or it's stolen? Even if you backed up your ebooks, they're now useless to you, and you're out $400+Books, rather than just $400, or even ~$40 for the 4-5 books you can carry around(or 1-2 hardcovers).
That would kill it right there for me. Fortuantly, my books have no DRM*.
You'd be better off to have some sort of account type system like iTunes. As a bonus, if your reader is stolen, if the company's smart and nice, they can set it up so that the moment it's plugged into a service the reader figures out it's stolen and bricks itself until a re-enablement code(that only you possess) is entered.
*Well, two do, but I got one for free, and had to get the other for reference.
This thing only comes with 256 MB of memory (plenty for ebooks, but come on, it's 2007)
Agreed, though I understand that it also takes a standard flash card format (can't remember which at the moment), so you could slap a gig card into it rather easily.
For $400 I want to see a functioning display model, maybe even take it home for a couple days. It'd be a very tough sell, and I already own a lot of ebooks(gotta love webscription.net). I'm definitely not ordering it over the internet - too much risk.
For $100 I'd probably buy it as long as somebody I trust reviews it and gives it good marks.
For $50 I'd be entering my credit card details now...
maybe, maybe not, but wouldn't you consider the size of the display a bit small?
I already don't take much time for a single page of a paperback, but while I think that a paperback has an acceptable amount of text on a page, I don't see how something with like 25% of display area would be good.
That would be interesting if applying DRM placed it under rules closer to 'trade secret' than 'patent'.
IE You're responsable for protecting it. Too bad if somebody else figures it out or steals it.
Currently that would make DRM have much less protection than copyright.
'Sir, we're charging XYZ for copying 'Frak Zone 3', the day after release'. -Plaintiff
'Your honor, 'Frak Zone 3' was under DRM restrictions, which we merely bypassed, we'd have had it out earlier, but didn't want to fight the lines to get a copy to work on.' - Defendent
'Is this true?' - Judge
'Yes, your honor, 'Frak Zone 3' was protected by SecuromXCP' - Plaintiff
'Copyright law is not applicable then, Case Dismissed, with prejudice'. - Judge
copyrights that last 50 years after the death of it's creator are no longer benefiting it's owner
Well, technically it could be. After all, elvis copyrights are still bringing in the bucks. Still, it's not helping Elvis any.
Personally, I think that 'life or 50, whichever's greater' would be good. That allows a creater of content to control it, and the 50 year clause allows even a deathbed artist to sell his or her works. Without the 50 year clause it'd be difficult even for authers like Robert Jordan* to get publishers interested in his work - after all, they can simply wait.
I mean, with the current situation copyright is likely to pass on to people that the author never even knew. Great grandchildren, for example.
I say go to 'The first decade's free', requiring ~$10 for subsequent decades, along with an up to date mailing address to the Library of Congress to keep copyright up. Oh yeah, and a master copy must be provided to the LoC to be stored. Electronic format is acceptable - but must be *master* quality. For a book, the file used to program the printing presses, for example. For movies, the digital movie theater quality version, or at least a glass master. Same sort of thing for Music - a copy of the master in a long term format. This way when the artist dies and the 50 years from creation has passed, it's available for open source use.
In exchange, anybody wishing to find the copyright owner merely has to query the LoC. Though I'll admit that individual photos might become difficult. Books, Music, and Movies(and TV shows) are fairly easy, but what about individual photographs? Then again, how many are useful after the first decade?
With a machine like this, a qualified teacher can write his/her own textbooks.
It'd probably be an effort though. Still, even a minimally more capable machine would be fine.
Learning? How much did I learn from those expensive (tax-payed) textbooks I had in elementary? How often did I crack them? Why did I prefer the family Encyclopedia set?
Mine, at least, were educational. I especially enjoyed some of the But then I generally actually read them. The only problem with that was what to do in class after the first week.
Ideally though, we'd see a shift away from 'textbooks' to a more dynamic learning program. That'll just take time. Many are still stuck on the 'book' context.
How much more would I have learned had I had a machine like this to take notes on?
Depends on your motivation. Assuming that you probably had dependable access to paper for note taking, a OLPC probably wouldn't help. But when you get down to the level of the kids we're looking at handing these to, you can't assume that.
I wouldn't even necessarily call the OLPC more fragile than books. It's just differently fragile/tough. More vulnerable to some things, less to others.
How do you keep them from getting wet and dirty?
Very good point. In a humid environment, I could see books rotting before the OLPC would fail.
Figure a textbook on the cheap is 5 bucks. This is 1/10 to 1/20th of what many class textbooks in the USA cost. It'd also be very close to physical cost, after all, we're talking about large books here, frequently color.
Then the break even point is 40 books(assuming the books, in electronic format at least, are free). It would have been 20 if they'd managed to meet their original cost goal. Stick some extras in there like an encyclopedia. There's many options.
For a 'normal' course load, I'd figure on 5 books a semester. Stuff like Math, Reading, Writing, History, Geography. While you could consider Reading/Writing one subject, you can also tack on a foreign language, speech, science, etc...
So it'd take 8 semesters or 4 years to pay itself off - if all it did was replace textbooks. Which it doesn't - it can also be used for test taking, quizzes, notes, additional reference materials, helping the parents apply for an online loan, etc... I'm sure somebody will produce educational games for it eventually - sure, it might have minimal specs for today, but it's still an order of magnitude more powerful than the machine I played Oregon trail on back when I was in school.
Perhaps the most important thing it could do is help the next generation become comfortable with technology, and resist superstition. We are talking about some very poor areas here.
I know that, but I was figuring on 'At least DVD quality, if not HDTV'.
You can scrunch down video pretty low as long as you're willing to accept the loss in quality. For a service such as this I would rather trade off increased download time for 'best quality' video. Even if I only end up watching it on my computer monitor.
Averaged out it seems to be about 1.5 - 1.8Mbits -- and that's for the highest quality that they offer.
So I figured about double the actual datastream they offer(currently). I figured a 3:1 ratio(download time vs play time), but only 1 MBit download speed.
I do know one thing, though. I'm going to have to check into netflix again.
Note that I said 'could have'. I wouldn't think that it'd be a common connector, but I've found TVs without even RCA more frequently than you might think.
At least some companies really knew how to make stuff back then. Well that, and you're sure to have some outliers when you sell millions of them.
Not when that 42 million dollars is eventually going to come out of Taxpayer money, y'know.
Little issue here: The post office is not supported by taxes, income is solely through postage fees.
Though the post office does end up with the problem that if somebody's mailings are costing more than others, they can't just eat the losses - they either have to charge that person/business more or raise the cost for everybody.
In this case, I'm surprised they haven't complained to netflix earlier. They already have all sorts of rules for mass mailings in order to qualify for the best price structures. Stuff like printing the barcode on yourself, sorting it yourself, etc...
Consider that the standard netflix plan is 3 DVDs out at a time. So I figure you'll be able to watch 1 movie a day, on average (1 day to mail, 1 day to watch, 1 day to return).
Figure that the average movie can fit into 2gigs due to using more advanced compression than DVD's MPEG and that the consumer has a 2mbit connection. I figure it'd take roughly 16k seconds to download. 1k(mbit to gbit)*8(bit to byte)*2(figure only half the pipe is used for actual data, rest is for overhead and other network traffic).
That'd be 266 minutes to download our ~120 minute movie. Start downloading a couple hours ahead of time and have a couple potty breaks and you'd be able to watch the movie the same day.
Introduce a faster connection like an unsaturated cable service and you'd quickly enter 'able to stream it'.
How about, instead of all that, simply having a network capable box that streams video from your computer with the service installed? IE your computer acts as the server, streams it to a box with no HD.
The box would come with the remote and some simple system to browse through and play your media files from your TV.
Apple apparently has something similar, but I was thinking something more streamlined for ~$100-$150.
The box could have anything/everything from coax to component to HDMI.
That actually sounds like a very good solution. Whether it's 5mph or 1 mph, it just makes alternate routes sound better.
Still, even this might have issues - if the stop is on the far end of the village, it might try to direct traffic around the bypass to approach from the other side, even though it's faster(and authorized) to come in directly.
A setting to of 'only use this if a destination/origin is in the local area' would be better. Then again, maybe we can use something like routing protocols - use this path first that path second, the dial-up modem last.
So Interstate highways get a 5*, intrastates 6, 'main throughfares' a 7, minor throughfares a 8, residential streets a 9, and 'restricted duty' a 10.
A 5 gets a 10% or so advantage over a 6, and so on. So a restricted duty road would have to cut that segment of the trip by 60% in estimated time/distance in order to win over a major interstate highway.
Hmm... Another thought: bypasses get a 5% advantage - for a 20 minute drive, that'd only be a minute's difference, and would help keep traffic down inside the city(the whole purpose of bypasses).
Finally - especially for trucking, they need to start noting restrictions like width, height, and weight into the mapping systems. So when a trucker notes that he's driving a wide load that's 16' high that's 12k pounds per axle, the system goes through and finds an appropriate amount. Then again, driving such a load would require a chaser vehicle and permits here in the states(and a bloody good reason to be shipping it on the roads).
*I'd start it here to give room for upgrades, like 'catch the highspeed train 'ferry' for this crosscountry trip'.
electronic voting machines can be made secure enough
That's currently the big if right now. It's just not transparent enough, and it's like all the companies building machines forgot completely about security; substituting a little theater instead. In addition, I don't like how a single machine or media failure can take out all of a machine's votes for the election. Two or three of those can throw elections today.
In addition, most of the advocates of paper voting have been talking about optical scan ballots. This opens up recounts to multiple solutions - Company X's scanner, Company Y's scanner, verified by hand if deemed necessary.
I am not one of those who believe that hand counting is automatically the most accurate - but optical scanning is old tech at this point, very accurate, and most importantly - auditable.
Secure and accurate Voting is always going to be complicated and tough - especially when you figure that you normally have at least two parties with people willing to cheat, who may be in the system.
Sounds like you come under this clause: If I was driving to new locations all the time I'd consider a GPS
I never said that the locations couldn't be close together. In addition, professional purposes like delivery can justify expensive electronics even if it only saves you an hour a week.
Then again, you sometimes have to wonder about cabbies - how the heck did they operate before GPS?
I'm not THAT bad of a butcher, and with the right supplies it'd be quite possible to convert most it to jerky or other forms that wouldn't spoil even without refridgeration. In real(er) life I'd have stopped for an additional day if that was necessary to get that 100lbs up to 500 or so. I'd even get a buffalo blanket or coat out of it as a bonus.
Even in grade school I knew that modern refridgeration and spoilage guidelines are on the paranoid side.
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Take it a step further though. While a literate population is better off than an illiterate one, literacy is simply one tool. This reminds me of this old 'state of being' stages of realization.
We could do something similar for poverty, people in need of aid.
Level 1: Needs food, water, shelter - At more or less immediate risk of death.
Level 2: Ignorant, subsidence level existence - The farmers in China, for example, who live much as their ancestors 5k years ago did. Illiteracy, superstition rampant.
Level 3: Has basic knowledge, but needs more. Equipment, training in more specific areas, etc... They might be literate, but don't have anything to take advantage of that.
Until an area gets beyond level 3, they aren't necessarily self-sustaining. Sure as heck can't help others out.
OLPC would be aid for level 3, maybe phasing into level 2.
but the continent needs basic literacy, which is achievable with paper, pencils, a schoolroom, and a teacher.
Many areas have basic literacy, but we need to go beyond that. Teachers get expensive. At $200/computer, you could provide five to a remote village for a mere $1k, which is still less than what I'd expect it to cost to provide a cut-rate teacher with basic supplies there. With the proper programs, the computers become the teachers. Remote teaching, etc...
That's why you'd want to build it using the cheapest parts possible; keeping it from being worth much rendered down. Proprietary parts could help as well.
You just have to make is so that breaking parts down is worth less than what it takes to render them down and transport to somewhere there's money to purchase them.
Keeping it modular so villages can salvage in the field wouldn't be bad.
Yes people are still starving but it is less than it has been before and the reason for hunger is almost always political, economic, or weather related. Much of the human reasons for keeping people hungry are dealt with when you educate and empower the population.
Today I'd even knock out the 'weather related'. The USA produces enough food by itself to feed the world, much of the problem of starving people is transportation - and politics blocking the transportation.
It's very much a 'give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him how to fish and he eats for life'.
Provide a subsidence farmer, even in the form of loans, a tractor, miscellaneous equipment and supplies, and the training how to use it and you'll have somebody who isn't a subsidence farmer anymore. He can produce enough food to pay off his loans as well as free up hundreds of other subsidence farmers to do things like work in the tractor/fertilizer factories, bicycle factories, and everything else that a developed economy needs.
With food aid I've seen unfortunate consequences: Local farmers are driven out of business*, women continue to have babies, and you end up with a population explosion of people who still can't take care of themselves. IE the food aid makes the problem *worse*. In at least one case very much worse - the food aid allowed a warlord to continue his campaign against the farmers who's farms he'd been burning.
I'd much rather concentrate on enabling people to take care of themselves. Provide equipment, training, and the security needed for them to work if necessary**.
Unfortunately, this is at least one order of magnitude more expensive than simply providing food. I'm of the opinion that it'd be better to do this, even if you can't feed everybody as a result of the diverted resources. The idea is that after doing this for ten years you don't need to provide food aid anymore except for short term disasters like a tsunami. Unlike current situations like with locations in Africa - which has needed food aid for decades.
*US product can easily be superior than what a 3rd world farmer can produce, and you can't beat 'free'.
**Like the current situation in the middle east, work on training up and equipping local defense forces, both military and police. That way you don't have to provide security forever.
Exactly - There's two components to the cost of a book: Physical - printing, binding, shipping all cost money. The second is Royalties/profit. For textbooks, the second is usually larger than the first.
For developing nations, It's not like we're really forced to use fully up to date math textbooks with their $$$ going to a pool of authors/publisher.
I figure they can come up with either some public domain books, get some authors to agree to reduced/group royalties, etc...
See, this is one of the reasons that I'd want to see the thing, preferably functional, so I can figure this stuff out.
Maybe there also should be a fingerprint reader so that the rightful owner can "brick" the thing if it is taken under duress
I'd be careful about that. Your suggestion has two problems as I see it: You need to perform an action to disable it, which muggers are unlikely to allow you to do, and a thief will try to get it without you realizing it. The second is that there's been at least one case where they ended up taking the guy's finger. Sure, it was a car rather than something as mere as a ebook reader - but people HAVE died for $20(and less!) before.
So what you want is an activation system - where you need to reactivate it via some means whenever you turn it on or wake it up from sleep mode.
But, as for the subscription service, that would negate bricking, unless a bricking feature wipes out the account by custom selection.
This would be easy actually. Think of something like a cell phone. When it's stolen, they know what the serial number of your phone is. They distribute some update, and suddenly the phone not only doesn't work, you also can't just stick a new chip in it. If you recover the phone, as the owner you'd be able to authorize it's reactivation.
This, at least theoretically, would reduce cellphone theft as people know that they only have a few hours before it'll stop working, permantently. If they try to sell it, they'll have some trouble from the 'I'm stolen!' display on the screen.
As for your account, you buy/legally aquire a new reader and add it to your account and start redownloading your books to it.
I was responding to the parent's suggestion of tying the DRM to the machine, and using that when you purchase an ebook.
Still, I'm wary of services like iTunes and other DRM encumbered services; it reduces interoperability. It might take a little work, but I shouldn't have much trouble getting webscription ebooks or mp3's into any player. Not so with something with DRM, and I don't want to end up having to have a dozen different accounts with various publishers, or even being that tightly tied to a given distributer like amazon.
At least with webscription, if I get sufficiently irked with them I can download all my books and throw them on a DVD*
I can't just export my media purchases from amazon to webscriptions to iTunes to Steam to etc... (yes, I know I'm mixing media types).
*Now that's scary, I have so many of them they won't fit onto a CD. Though a DVD will have plenty of room, even keeping both compressed and uncompressed versions.
I own hundreds of ebooks. I own many more physical books. I read frequently, however, I've only read the ebooks on a computer so far. None of the readers has caught my eye enough to make me take the plunge.
.75 seconds to .25, and increase compatibility with various formats... This is all stuff that's happened in the computer industry, so I don't think that it's unreasonable.
For one thing, I'm not going to splurge $400 on a reader I've never seen or touched.
Now, cut the price in half, double the memory, cut the screen change time from
Then it'd make sense and I'd have my card out.
Of course, I do travel for extended periods of time with limited luggage capacity - I'd love be able to haul a substantial portion of my library on a device smaller than my laptop, with better lifespan and long term readability than said laptop.
where the publisher simply encrypts a book for your particular device
What happens when an accident occurs and you break the thing, or it's stolen? Even if you backed up your ebooks, they're now useless to you, and you're out $400+Books, rather than just $400, or even ~$40 for the 4-5 books you can carry around(or 1-2 hardcovers).
That would kill it right there for me. Fortuantly, my books have no DRM*.
You'd be better off to have some sort of account type system like iTunes. As a bonus, if your reader is stolen, if the company's smart and nice, they can set it up so that the moment it's plugged into a service the reader figures out it's stolen and bricks itself until a re-enablement code(that only you possess) is entered.
*Well, two do, but I got one for free, and had to get the other for reference.
This thing only comes with 256 MB of memory (plenty for ebooks, but come on, it's 2007)
Agreed, though I understand that it also takes a standard flash card format (can't remember which at the moment), so you could slap a gig card into it rather easily.
For $400 I want to see a functioning display model, maybe even take it home for a couple days. It'd be a very tough sell, and I already own a lot of ebooks(gotta love webscription.net). I'm definitely not ordering it over the internet - too much risk.
For $100 I'd probably buy it as long as somebody I trust reviews it and gives it good marks.
For $50 I'd be entering my credit card details now...
maybe, maybe not, but wouldn't you consider the size of the display a bit small?
I already don't take much time for a single page of a paperback, but while I think that a paperback has an acceptable amount of text on a page, I don't see how something with like 25% of display area would be good.
That would be interesting if applying DRM placed it under rules closer to 'trade secret' than 'patent'.
IE You're responsable for protecting it. Too bad if somebody else figures it out or steals it.
Currently that would make DRM have much less protection than copyright.
'Sir, we're charging XYZ for copying 'Frak Zone 3', the day after release'. -Plaintiff
'Your honor, 'Frak Zone 3' was under DRM restrictions, which we merely bypassed, we'd have had it out earlier, but didn't want to fight the lines to get a copy to work on.' - Defendent
'Is this true?' - Judge
'Yes, your honor, 'Frak Zone 3' was protected by SecuromXCP' - Plaintiff
'Copyright law is not applicable then, Case Dismissed, with prejudice'. - Judge
copyrights that last 50 years after the death of it's creator are no longer benefiting it's owner
Well, technically it could be. After all, elvis copyrights are still bringing in the bucks. Still, it's not helping Elvis any.
Personally, I think that 'life or 50, whichever's greater' would be good. That allows a creater of content to control it, and the 50 year clause allows even a deathbed artist to sell his or her works. Without the 50 year clause it'd be difficult even for authers like Robert Jordan* to get publishers interested in his work - after all, they can simply wait.
I mean, with the current situation copyright is likely to pass on to people that the author never even knew. Great grandchildren, for example.
I say go to 'The first decade's free', requiring ~$10 for subsequent decades, along with an up to date mailing address to the Library of Congress to keep copyright up. Oh yeah, and a master copy must be provided to the LoC to be stored. Electronic format is acceptable - but must be *master* quality. For a book, the file used to program the printing presses, for example. For movies, the digital movie theater quality version, or at least a glass master. Same sort of thing for Music - a copy of the master in a long term format. This way when the artist dies and the 50 years from creation has passed, it's available for open source use.
In exchange, anybody wishing to find the copyright owner merely has to query the LoC. Though I'll admit that individual photos might become difficult. Books, Music, and Movies(and TV shows) are fairly easy, but what about individual photographs? Then again, how many are useful after the first decade?
*passed on earlier this year.
With a machine like this, a qualified teacher can write his/her own textbooks.
It'd probably be an effort though. Still, even a minimally more capable machine would be fine.
Learning? How much did I learn from those expensive (tax-payed) textbooks I had in elementary? How often did I crack them? Why did I prefer the family Encyclopedia set?
Mine, at least, were educational. I especially enjoyed some of the But then I generally actually read them. The only problem with that was what to do in class after the first week.
Ideally though, we'd see a shift away from 'textbooks' to a more dynamic learning program. That'll just take time. Many are still stuck on the 'book' context.
How much more would I have learned had I had a machine like this to take notes on?
Depends on your motivation. Assuming that you probably had dependable access to paper for note taking, a OLPC probably wouldn't help. But when you get down to the level of the kids we're looking at handing these to, you can't assume that.
I wouldn't even necessarily call the OLPC more fragile than books. It's just differently fragile/tough. More vulnerable to some things, less to others.
How do you keep them from getting wet and dirty?
Very good point. In a humid environment, I could see books rotting before the OLPC would fail.
Figure a textbook on the cheap is 5 bucks. This is 1/10 to 1/20th of what many class textbooks in the USA cost. It'd also be very close to physical cost, after all, we're talking about large books here, frequently color.
Then the break even point is 40 books(assuming the books, in electronic format at least, are free). It would have been 20 if they'd managed to meet their original cost goal. Stick some extras in there like an encyclopedia. There's many options.
For a 'normal' course load, I'd figure on 5 books a semester. Stuff like Math, Reading, Writing, History, Geography. While you could consider Reading/Writing one subject, you can also tack on a foreign language, speech, science, etc...
So it'd take 8 semesters or 4 years to pay itself off - if all it did was replace textbooks. Which it doesn't - it can also be used for test taking, quizzes, notes, additional reference materials, helping the parents apply for an online loan, etc... I'm sure somebody will produce educational games for it eventually - sure, it might have minimal specs for today, but it's still an order of magnitude more powerful than the machine I played Oregon trail on back when I was in school.
Perhaps the most important thing it could do is help the next generation become comfortable with technology, and resist superstition. We are talking about some very poor areas here.
I know that, but I was figuring on 'At least DVD quality, if not HDTV'.
You can scrunch down video pretty low as long as you're willing to accept the loss in quality. For a service such as this I would rather trade off increased download time for 'best quality' video. Even if I only end up watching it on my computer monitor.
Averaged out it seems to be about 1.5 - 1.8Mbits -- and that's for the highest quality that they offer.
So I figured about double the actual datastream they offer(currently). I figured a 3:1 ratio(download time vs play time), but only 1 MBit download speed.
I do know one thing, though. I'm going to have to check into netflix again.
Note that I said 'could have'. I wouldn't think that it'd be a common connector, but I've found TVs without even RCA more frequently than you might think.
At least some companies really knew how to make stuff back then. Well that, and you're sure to have some outliers when you sell millions of them.
Not when that 42 million dollars is eventually going to come out of Taxpayer money, y'know.
Little issue here: The post office is not supported by taxes, income is solely through postage fees.
Though the post office does end up with the problem that if somebody's mailings are costing more than others, they can't just eat the losses - they either have to charge that person/business more or raise the cost for everybody.
In this case, I'm surprised they haven't complained to netflix earlier. They already have all sorts of rules for mass mailings in order to qualify for the best price structures. Stuff like printing the barcode on yourself, sorting it yourself, etc...
yes, the latency is a killer. ;)
Consider that the standard netflix plan is 3 DVDs out at a time. So I figure you'll be able to watch 1 movie a day, on average (1 day to mail, 1 day to watch, 1 day to return).
Figure that the average movie can fit into 2gigs due to using more advanced compression than DVD's MPEG and that the consumer has a 2mbit connection. I figure it'd take roughly 16k seconds to download. 1k(mbit to gbit)*8(bit to byte)*2(figure only half the pipe is used for actual data, rest is for overhead and other network traffic).
That'd be 266 minutes to download our ~120 minute movie. Start downloading a couple hours ahead of time and have a couple potty breaks and you'd be able to watch the movie the same day.
Introduce a faster connection like an unsaturated cable service and you'd quickly enter 'able to stream it'.
How about, instead of all that, simply having a network capable box that streams video from your computer with the service installed? IE your computer acts as the server, streams it to a box with no HD.
The box would come with the remote and some simple system to browse through and play your media files from your TV.
Apple apparently has something similar, but I was thinking something more streamlined for ~$100-$150.
The box could have anything/everything from coax to component to HDMI.
That actually sounds like a very good solution. Whether it's 5mph or 1 mph, it just makes alternate routes sound better.
Still, even this might have issues - if the stop is on the far end of the village, it might try to direct traffic around the bypass to approach from the other side, even though it's faster(and authorized) to come in directly.
A setting to of 'only use this if a destination/origin is in the local area' would be better. Then again, maybe we can use something like routing protocols - use this path first that path second, the dial-up modem last.
So Interstate highways get a 5*, intrastates 6, 'main throughfares' a 7, minor throughfares a 8, residential streets a 9, and 'restricted duty' a 10.
A 5 gets a 10% or so advantage over a 6, and so on. So a restricted duty road would have to cut that segment of the trip by 60% in estimated time/distance in order to win over a major interstate highway.
Hmm... Another thought: bypasses get a 5% advantage - for a 20 minute drive, that'd only be a minute's difference, and would help keep traffic down inside the city(the whole purpose of bypasses).
Finally - especially for trucking, they need to start noting restrictions like width, height, and weight into the mapping systems. So when a trucker notes that he's driving a wide load that's 16' high that's 12k pounds per axle, the system goes through and finds an appropriate amount. Then again, driving such a load would require a chaser vehicle and permits here in the states(and a bloody good reason to be shipping it on the roads).
*I'd start it here to give room for upgrades, like 'catch the highspeed train 'ferry' for this crosscountry trip'.
electronic voting machines can be made secure enough
That's currently the big if right now. It's just not transparent enough, and it's like all the companies building machines forgot completely about security; substituting a little theater instead. In addition, I don't like how a single machine or media failure can take out all of a machine's votes for the election. Two or three of those can throw elections today.
In addition, most of the advocates of paper voting have been talking about optical scan ballots. This opens up recounts to multiple solutions - Company X's scanner, Company Y's scanner, verified by hand if deemed necessary.
I am not one of those who believe that hand counting is automatically the most accurate - but optical scanning is old tech at this point, very accurate, and most importantly - auditable.
Secure and accurate Voting is always going to be complicated and tough - especially when you figure that you normally have at least two parties with people willing to cheat, who may be in the system.
Given that you would also presumably be going very slowly, it should do much.
Even an inch should be enough.
Sounds like you come under this clause:
If I was driving to new locations all the time I'd consider a GPS
I never said that the locations couldn't be close together. In addition, professional purposes like delivery can justify expensive electronics even if it only saves you an hour a week.
Then again, you sometimes have to wonder about cabbies - how the heck did they operate before GPS?
Grin...
I'm not THAT bad of a butcher, and with the right supplies it'd be quite possible to convert most it to jerky or other forms that wouldn't spoil even without refridgeration.
In real(er) life I'd have stopped for an additional day if that was necessary to get that 100lbs up to 500 or so. I'd even get a buffalo blanket or coat out of it as a bonus.
Even in grade school I knew that modern refridgeration and spoilage guidelines are on the paranoid side.