Of course, they need money to do that and they don't really have much of that any more.
When a litigant runs out of money, the correct reaction — or so one would conclude from reading Slashdot's descriptions of some other lawsuits — is to donate to their cause, so that the truth and justice prevails regardless of which side has deeper pockets.
If you're trying to imply that we should have expected OLPC to overperform, given its funding.
What I was saying, funding is not the deciding factor in an efficient economy such as America's (until very recently anyway).
These companies could have been doing them before the turn of the century.
No, not really. There is a large fixed cost of making a computer portable and light. Adding a feature here and there on top of that fixed cost is marginally more expensive. Cheap laptops existed for a while, but they weren't as cheap as a few hundred dollars until the technology appeared to do that. Your belief, that the technology appeared because of OLPC is quite touching, but you aren't presenting any evidence.
But why speculate? Already their government is trumpeting the success of their space-program as that of their science and engineering — when, in fact, it is due, at least partially, to espionage. That the theft propped up a fairly evil regime is, in itself, (slightly) hurting the national security of the United States.
It's more of a matter of industrial espionage rather than national security.
The same fuel tanks, that China has put on the spaceships, that they are so proud of, thanks to the stolen technology, can be (and, in all likelyhood, are being) put on the ballistic missiles.
In this case, the capitalist starts out with billions of dollars more than the do-gooder, not to mention already existing product development, shipping, customer service, and research department.
That's not at all, how start-ups start up (pun intended) — in the proverbial garages of their founders, lucky to get $20-80K of "seed financing". Michael Dell started his company with $1000 in 1984. Hewlett and Packard founded theirs with $538 (in 1939th money). On contrast, the OLPC was sponsored by AMD, Brightstar Corporation, eBay, Google, Marvell, News Corporation, SES, Nortel Networks, and Red Hat, each of whom donated 2 million dollars.
You were saying?
Speaking of market failures, exactly where were all these netbooks before OLPC announced their intentions?
Getting designed. Wait a minute, are you, actually, praising OLPC for vaporware?
Can the XO-1's charitable appeal, unique chassis and dual-mode screen compete with the superior performance and standard operating systems of its newer peers?
The intersection of charitable people and people designing good computers is not empty, but there are many more people in the second group. Capitalism will do things better, than any group of starry-eyed do-gooders.
And if you say "market failure" — I'll pull out this very case of "$100 laptop" and beat you over the head with it. In the time it took the charity to create their machine (at twice the planned-for cost), the market came up with better machines. Oh, and the charity still needs a capitalist to manage shipping logistics. Wow...
Thats a lot of corners fom Boston to NYC - at $5 a pop that'll be pricey.
Well, not every corner justifies the caution... But yes, I'd rather a drone was flying ahead of me — automatically avoiding bridges and cables. That's a few years off, I fear...
I think better tool would be a GPS-RadarDetector-3G Data combo device (can use BT cell phone for data feed) that can detect radars and pass information to central db and thus to all local users.
I hear you, but why bother with central DB? The information is only useful to those in the immediate vicinity in both space and time. And the central DB can be outlawed. No the information should be broadcast locally, perhaps, indeed, through BT.
And then, when you find yourself approaching a hill or a corner without the broadcast's reassuring carrier, you shoot the grenade...
I want a bunch of disposable ones, that I can shoot ahead from my car, when approaching a hill or a curve on the road. Instead of live video, though, it would alert me of a speed-trap ahead... If they could make these to cost, say, $5 a pop, the cost of a road-trip from Boston to New York can really come down in cost...
True enough. But, of course, then they're not as likely to be able to make an unbiased decision either.
No one is fully unbiased. Hence my original question, now moderated down into the stone age: was the new people's expertise the main criteria, or their past criticism of Bush's policies?
the results were often less than satisfactory to anyone outside those particular industries.
You know, it depends on the priorities of the people... Here is an example of the much smaller government, a lot closer to its subjects: a town's building inspector. I'm trying to renovate a house we just bought, and the permit application has been pending for over 6 weeks (twice the State's legal limit, BTW), as the inspectors keep finding little flaws in our plans. I truly hate these people — with passion. In my long-held Libertarian opinion, what people do with their own houses (and other property) is no less their own business, than the kind of sex they engage in in their own bedrooms, or the kind of substances they smoke.
But one can not do anything without a permit, and those are issued by the Executive branch's bureaucrats, who — in a college professor's opinion — is, likely, doing an excellent job enforcing the building code to the letter.
I would've applauded the company's stance immediately, had it not been for a nagging though: the data is not entirely theirs.
What's less ethical: paying off a blackmailer, or risking your customer's very sensitive data?
Then, again, there is no guarantee, the blackmail will ever stop anyway — even embarrassing photos can be copied before returning, digital files are practically guaranteed to remain in the scumbag's possession — so trying to apprehend the guy would still seem like the right thing to do...
All the extortionist need do now is move the data to someone else's machine then shop him in.
The subsequent criminal investigation — capture and conviction are the conditions for the reward — is likely to reveal the truth anyway. Slipping somebody a gun, or bag of cocaine, or stolen (hey, at least, we aren't arguing about the applicability of the term here!) data does make the person a suspect, but not a convict — unless a policeman is doing it, for judges tend to trust those people...
The court will have to hear a credible explanation of how the accused got it, and the attention is likely to shift to the one claiming reward.
Are there any outside-the-Beltway experts who _aren't_ harsh critics of the Bush administration's telecom policies?
Of course, there are. None of the major telecommunication companies have headquarters inside the Beltway... And, surprise-surprise, a real expert is more likely to work in their field, than be a college professor (in the field). And not all of them hate Bush with Academia's passion.
The cutting lasers used in industrial production are 3 kW or less, and are fairly effective in slicing through steel.
How thick is the steel and how quickly is it cut? Will a civilian airplane flying through a 15kW beam (for a fraction of a second) simply be sliced in half?
And if 15wK is still dangerous, then they should be looking at even smaller ones — just more of them. Maybe, even, rucksack-mounted wirelessly-coordinated ones...
Not at all. It's a perfectly legitimate comment. [...]
I didn't challenge the legitimacy of the comment. I just pointed out, that it has nothing to do with any particular government project — it is perfectly generic. If a newspaper reporter were to call an expert soliciting comment in middle of the night, the "expert" could've answered that safely and go back to sleep never learning, what the weapon was...
I am saying that there's a high probability that it will ultimately cost us far more that it's worth.
Is that a legitimately on-topic reply to my comment, where I suggested, laser power should be dispersed among multiple smaller installations, rather than a single large one? No, and no...
And military contractors looking forward to the next major cost overrun rather than shipping a working system.
This is such a generic canned response, it can be used to put down any conversation about weapons without delving into a particular system's details. You are failing the Turing Test, in other words...
can be synchronized with additional units to emit a 100 kW beam
Using multiple such things, each of them too wimpy to cause much damage seems important. First, it makes it much harder for the enemy to knock them off — hitting one unit disables a small fraction of the whole. Second, the power can be concentrated at different targets depending on the need (soldiers, a missile, an artillery shell, a plane) — rather than the all-or-nothing of a single giant laser. And third, an errant device will not be as harmful — for example, if, when the network of these are shooting at an incoming missile, one of them hits a civilian plane or some other unintended object. No problem — a single beam is too weak to be really harmful.
Now, of course, they would need to be very precisely targeted and coordinated. Fortunately, we have GPS and powerful computers...
So by your reasoning, you should be able to be imprisoned by the chinese government if you watch (by chinese government deemed) illegal content on a website that's hosted on a server in China.
Yes, as a matter of fact, that's true. I wish, more people realized that, and stopped doing business with China...
Not that your analogy is valid, really, because prosecutions in China aren't determined by the Law, but mostly by political and/or economic expediency.
It depends on where he committed the crime. He's a german citizen commiting a crime in germany (and he was punished for it under german law) then that FBI can GTFO as far as I'm concerned. If they were that bothered they could have applied for extradition rather that using underhand tricks.
The original poster, who started this thread, claimed: "tricks like this should not be legal". And the follow-up question was: "Why not?" Your point is, the guy shouldn't be prosecuted here, even he were caught without the use of a trick...
Why not stick to the subject of the thread (which you didn't even change, it still says: "shouldn't be legal") and discuss the legality (or lack thereof) of the trick?
So it's always possible to dream up a scenario where the easiest solution is to pipe the output of grep into awk.
To refer to somebody else's Slashdot signature, that's like wrinkles on duct tape — poor craftsmanship. One can do this while typing on a command line, but never in a written-down script, that's to be executed more than 5 times.
Slashdot Mirror
When a litigant runs out of money, the correct reaction — or so one would conclude from reading Slashdot's descriptions of some other lawsuits — is to donate to their cause, so that the truth and justice prevails regardless of which side has deeper pockets.
Right?
What I was saying, funding is not the deciding factor in an efficient economy such as America's (until very recently anyway).
No, not really. There is a large fixed cost of making a computer portable and light. Adding a feature here and there on top of that fixed cost is marginally more expensive. Cheap laptops existed for a while, but they weren't as cheap as a few hundred dollars until the technology appeared to do that. Your belief, that the technology appeared because of OLPC is quite touching, but you aren't presenting any evidence.
There is no such thing...
The bigger they get, the fewer such patents there will be, the harder it will become for them to stay in business. Hardly a viable model...
I certainly don't... The Chinese very well might.
But why speculate? Already their government is trumpeting the success of their space-program as that of their science and engineering — when, in fact, it is due, at least partially, to espionage. That the theft propped up a fairly evil regime is, in itself, (slightly) hurting the national security of the United States.
The same fuel tanks, that China has put on the spaceships, that they are so proud of, thanks to the stolen technology, can be (and, in all likelyhood, are being) put on the ballistic missiles.
It is national security...
That's not at all, how start-ups start up (pun intended) — in the proverbial garages of their founders, lucky to get $20-80K of "seed financing". Michael Dell started his company with $1000 in 1984. Hewlett and Packard founded theirs with $538 (in 1939th money). On contrast, the OLPC was sponsored by AMD, Brightstar Corporation, eBay, Google, Marvell, News Corporation, SES, Nortel Networks, and Red Hat, each of whom donated 2 million dollars.
You were saying?
Getting designed. Wait a minute, are you, actually, praising OLPC for vaporware?
The intersection of charitable people and people designing good computers is not empty, but there are many more people in the second group. Capitalism will do things better, than any group of starry-eyed do-gooders.
And if you say "market failure" — I'll pull out this very case of "$100 laptop" and beat you over the head with it. In the time it took the charity to create their machine (at twice the planned-for cost), the market came up with better machines. Oh, and the charity still needs a capitalist to manage shipping logistics. Wow...
Well, not every corner justifies the caution... But yes, I'd rather a drone was flying ahead of me — automatically avoiding bridges and cables. That's a few years off, I fear...
I hear you, but why bother with central DB? The information is only useful to those in the immediate vicinity in both space and time. And the central DB can be outlawed. No the information should be broadcast locally, perhaps, indeed, through BT.
And then, when you find yourself approaching a hill or a corner without the broadcast's reassuring carrier, you shoot the grenade...
I want a bunch of disposable ones, that I can shoot ahead from my car, when approaching a hill or a curve on the road. Instead of live video, though, it would alert me of a speed-trap ahead... If they could make these to cost, say, $5 a pop, the cost of a road-trip from Boston to New York can really come down in cost...
Extortion. A crime everywhere.
No one is fully unbiased. Hence my original question, now moderated down into the stone age: was the new people's expertise the main criteria, or their past criticism of Bush's policies?
You know, it depends on the priorities of the people... Here is an example of the much smaller government, a lot closer to its subjects: a town's building inspector. I'm trying to renovate a house we just bought, and the permit application has been pending for over 6 weeks (twice the State's legal limit, BTW), as the inspectors keep finding little flaws in our plans. I truly hate these people — with passion. In my long-held Libertarian opinion, what people do with their own houses (and other property) is no less their own business, than the kind of sex they engage in in their own bedrooms, or the kind of substances they smoke.
But one can not do anything without a permit, and those are issued by the Executive branch's bureaucrats, who — in a college professor's opinion — is, likely, doing an excellent job enforcing the building code to the letter.
I would've applauded the company's stance immediately, had it not been for a nagging though: the data is not entirely theirs .
What's less ethical: paying off a blackmailer, or risking your customer's very sensitive data?
Then, again, there is no guarantee, the blackmail will ever stop anyway — even embarrassing photos can be copied before returning, digital files are practically guaranteed to remain in the scumbag's possession — so trying to apprehend the guy would still seem like the right thing to do...
The subsequent criminal investigation — capture and conviction are the conditions for the reward — is likely to reveal the truth anyway. Slipping somebody a gun, or bag of cocaine, or stolen (hey, at least, we aren't arguing about the applicability of the term here!) data does make the person a suspect, but not a convict — unless a policeman is doing it, for judges tend to trust those people...
The court will have to hear a credible explanation of how the accused got it, and the attention is likely to shift to the one claiming reward.
Of course, there are. None of the major telecommunication companies have headquarters inside the Beltway... And, surprise-surprise, a real expert is more likely to work in their field, than be a college professor (in the field). And not all of them hate Bush with Academia's passion.
How thick is the steel and how quickly is it cut? Will a civilian airplane flying through a 15kW beam (for a fraction of a second) simply be sliced in half?
And if 15wK is still dangerous, then they should be looking at even smaller ones — just more of them. Maybe, even, rucksack-mounted wirelessly-coordinated ones...
I didn't challenge the legitimacy of the comment. I just pointed out, that it has nothing to do with any particular government project — it is perfectly generic. If a newspaper reporter were to call an expert soliciting comment in middle of the night, the "expert" could've answered that safely and go back to sleep never learning, what the weapon was...
Is that a legitimately on-topic reply to my comment, where I suggested, laser power should be dispersed among multiple smaller installations, rather than a single large one? No, and no...
Then listing both would've been "deeply" redundant, wouldn't it?
or
?
This is such a generic canned response, it can be used to put down any conversation about weapons without delving into a particular system's details. You are failing the Turing Test, in other words...
Not if you install them on their sides...
Using multiple such things, each of them too wimpy to cause much damage seems important. First, it makes it much harder for the enemy to knock them off — hitting one unit disables a small fraction of the whole. Second, the power can be concentrated at different targets depending on the need (soldiers, a missile, an artillery shell, a plane) — rather than the all-or-nothing of a single giant laser. And third, an errant device will not be as harmful — for example, if, when the network of these are shooting at an incoming missile, one of them hits a civilian plane or some other unintended object. No problem — a single beam is too weak to be really harmful.
Now, of course, they would need to be very precisely targeted and coordinated. Fortunately, we have GPS and powerful computers...
Yes, as a matter of fact, that's true. I wish, more people realized that, and stopped doing business with China...
Not that your analogy is valid, really, because prosecutions in China aren't determined by the Law, but mostly by political and/or economic expediency.
You realize, of course, that you've just immunized all successful IP-thieves from prosecution, don't you?
The next logical step would be to close all murder cases — what's the use, if it is not going to bring the victims back to life?..
The original poster, who started this thread, claimed: "tricks like this should not be legal". And the follow-up question was: "Why not?" Your point is, the guy shouldn't be prosecuted here, even he were caught without the use of a trick...
Why not stick to the subject of the thread (which you didn't even change, it still says: "shouldn't be legal") and discuss the legality (or lack thereof) of the trick?
To refer to somebody else's Slashdot signature, that's like wrinkles on duct tape — poor craftsmanship. One can do this while typing on a command line, but never in a written-down script, that's to be executed more than 5 times.