1) Are you familiar enough with accounting to categorically state that no large differences in talent and performance exist?
2) You seem to assume that, as a general case, because the programmer is an insufferable asshole, he necessarily has superior skills. Has that been your experience in the field?
Bah! Cheap, shoddy reimplementations of iTunes and the Windows GUI!
Half-joking there. Pinning down what constitutes "innovation" is hard under normal circumstances, and impossible when making the case to someone trying to defend a "X isn't innovative" thesis. It's like showing a creationist an Archaeopteryx as proof of evolutionary innovation, and having them dismiss it as a mere feathery lizard.
I consider Firefox pretty innovative, but it's still doing the same thing Mosaic was in the early nineties: rendering web pages. Innovation, or mere refinement?
Ruby on Rails: innovative? or a mere incremental improvement over the many frameworks that came before?
Another thing I'd add: given the volume of innovation taking place at the edges of technology, is it really the best time to start "innovating" around with the operating systems that support them? If the changes can be abstracted away so that applications don't see a difference, then such improvements are probably not sufficiently innovative. If they can't be, then adoption is hindered, and will be so long as the lower layers are seen as sufficient to support higher level activity. Look how little innovation has gone into the TCP/IP stack, despite its inadequacies. We can't even transition to IPv6, much less scrap it in favor of "innovative" approaches to internetworking.
There are lots of neat ideas out there, but a lot of innovation just can't fit existing frameworks.
Open source just wasn't around in its current form back when the basics of computer interaction were being laid down.
But, if we didn't control the world, wouldn't all that wealth just go to poor people, who would blow it on alcohol and cable TV?
Jesus. If you don't think Americans should govern the world and control its resources, that's like saying that we're not really God's chosen people. Why do you think Americans say they're the freest nation on Earth? It's because we're not only free to choose our own destiny, but free to choose everyone else's as well!
Yeah, poor kid of yours, who is discriminated against because her parents have the resources to buy her an OLPC themselves, or any of the competing ubercheap laptops. My heart weeps for the poor girl, it really does.
I suppose your child has earned herself an OLPC, by having the self-discipline and foresight to be born to comparatively rich parents.
If you think a kid-friendly laptop would benefit her, buy her one. The G1G1 program is still open. Oh, wait, you don't want any of your hard-earned money going to one of those undeserving kids. You'd rather wait until somebody mugs a Nigerian slum kid for you and puts it up on eBay.
Regarding the technical support thing: Nobody gets technical support from the OLPC. Not G1G1 donors, not nobody. Hell, even spare parts won't be available for another month or so. Purchasing government agencies bear the burden of handling repairs, which is why the designers worked so hard to make repairs easy.
P.S.: Peru is in South America, not Africa.
P.P.S: Yeah, I've been trolled. We've both proven that we have no lives, so I don't see how that makes you the winner here.
I was impressed too. The first time I installed and fired up emacs, it popped up with this impossibly tiny text. I leaned in really close, and lo and behold, the text was perfectly sharp.
Coal also contains mercury. Enough mercury that swapping an incandescent out for a CFL significantly reduces the amount of mercury released into the environment. Add in the fact that bulbs can be recycled (and very likely would be, if a $.50/bulb "return fee" were slapped onto the initial cost of each bulb) and the mercury issue is pretty well solved.
At this point, CFL skeptics sometimes drag out the story of a woman who paid thousands of dollars to have her apartment cleared of hazardous materials after she had a bulb break. But that was a simple case of acting on bad advice. The real solution is to open the windows, sweep the bulb into a plastic bag, vacuum up the remaining dust, and take the bag to a recycling facility.
Or just lick it up. My understanding is that a CFL has about as much mercury as thirty servings of tuna (the difference being that the tuna's mercury is bioavailable).
Don't credit the Founding Fathers for that. There is nothing in the Constitution about Senate filibusters. It's just a rule the Senate chose to adopt, and one that they could throw out at any time. Remember a couple of years ago, with the whole "nuclear option"? The Republicans were considering eliminating filibusters of judicial nominees, a rash act, but not an unconstitutional one.
There are a lot of people here with cushy government tech jobs, and they don't like the idea of having to compete in the market that would exist should my "utopia" come to fruition.
I don't think it's just "people here with cushy government tech jobs." Anyone who isn't the owner of a factory that makes firearms, barbed wire, or dried jerky stands to lose out in the aftermath of your revolution. Mad Max was a fun movie, and maybe a good theme for an adventure camp for bored rich folk. Nothing more.
If someone only comments on one topic (on a general discussion forum), it is at least a weak indicator that the person may only be there to promote an agenda. Usually a reading of a poster's history will turn up at least a few other interests.
In daveschroeder's case, he also seems to be a Mac geek, but mostly his primary purpose in participating seems to be the noble defense of entrenched interests.
Your problem is that you're taking an expression of spun's frustration, and trying to interpret it as a new logical dictum. The truth is, humans can't be perfectly logical, because we have neither the neural hardware nor the time to weigh each new argument without consideration of the source. In the real world, reputation matters. Someone who has tried to spin you over and over in the past is likely to try again in the future.
Also, an information source must generate new information in order to be worth engaging. If you notice that a given source tends to always discuss the same few topics, always taking the same viewpoint, using the same rhetorical tactics, you'll eventually stop learning much from that source. This is why I don't read Cal Thomas anymore. It's not that he's right-wing on every single issue; I ignore him because I know that I'm just in for a tired rehashing of points I could rattle off myself, plus a couple of well worn smears against liberals (which, again, I could rattle off myself). At least George Will gives me an occasional "Hmmm... I'd never considered that before." It sounds like spun has reached that point with daveschroeder, and vice versa. They're no longer interested in convincing the other, but simply desire to sway bystanders who might be taken in by their adversary's rhetorical skills.
As for the "incivility" betrayed by the left's treatment of General Petraeus, I feel we were justified in treating his status report with extreme skepticism. Not just because he was reporting on the success of his own strategy. Not just because the Bush administration has a history of making appointments based more on loyalty than competence, while removing people too willing to give bad news. Like every other department in the government, the Bush administration has succeeded in politicizing the military to an unprecedented degree. Petraeus, among other things, wrote a strongly upbeat editorial about the progress being made in Iraq, in the weeks before the 2004 election (when they were still running the old, failing strategy that Petraeus eventually had to be brought in to fix). In August, when he was giving his report, he spent most of his time fielding softballs from right-wing commentators. I think the Bush administration and his congressional allies used the military's reputation as a non-partisan institution to deflect criticism from Petraeus' partisan activities, to the detriment of both the military and the American people.
But how dare we highlight the matter with a tasteless pun.
After growing up believing that Mormons encountered persecution in Missouri and elsewhere because the Missourians were stirred up by Satan, a little bit of one-sidedness is needed to achieve a semblance of balance.
I don't think the Mormons did anything to warrant expulsion, and there were plenty of misunderstandings and hard feelings to go around. But if you insist on believing that the early Mormons are blameless for the hatred that they engendered, your picture of the time period is incomplete.
Gov. Boggs' "extermination order" was reprehensible, but it was issued not because of Mormon "beliefs," but because he had reason to believe (after the Battle of Crooked River) that the Mormons were in open rebellion against the state of Missouri. It is important to remember that it was Sidney Rigdon who first used the word "extermination" in reference to the conflict between Mormons and Missouri.
Our capacity for self-delusion is enormous. If you'd made a life-ruining decision based on a belief, it would be very hard to accept information that invalidated that belief.
Plus, the guy sounds like he's gone totally spare.
Yeah, yeah. This is like saying, "Every day, I give that same bum a nickel, and he never seems to get himself cleaned up. Must be blowing it all on booze." We have never sent enough aid to make a dent, and when we have it's often been in useless forms. Worse, if you calculate every penny of aid the West has sent to Africa, and then subtract the value of the resources we've extracted from the continent at firesale prices, the payments we demand for loans that went straight into the bank accounts of deposed dictators, and the "free trade" agreements we've inflicted on them to their detriment, they'd be far better off if the industrialized world had left them alone.
I'm still trying to master the crippleboard. Carpal tunnel has driven me to extreme measures. I'm down to about 25 WPM, from about 60 on QWERTY (-- that was unusually hard to type). But on the upside, I can still switch back when I need to, and I'm speeding up steadily.
IOW, the conversion hasn't been too painful thus far.
I have always thought Negroponte somewhat on the whacky side. He seems to be oblivious of the iron law of IT: standard is cheaper than non-standard.
Show me one non-standard component on the OLPC. I'm looking at Wikipedia, and it looks to me like one big laundry list of standard components.
Sugar is the only really non-standard piece, and that shouldn't add significantly to the overall costs.
You also claim that this "non-standardness" makes it less useful as an educational tool. You make it sound like the OLPC's purpose is to teach programming, which simply isn't the case. Hell, its primary purpose isn't even computer literacy. But it does come with several language interpreters, and I'm guessing a really ambitious student would be able to get a C++ compiler running on it. I'm just not seeing the problem, unless you're of the "if the kids aren't learning Windows, MS Office, and MS Visual Studio, they aren't learning" mindset.
It does not matter much how much something costs today, wait one technology cycle and what was the bleeding edge is the commodity item, wait two cycles and its on closeout.
Which is why Negroponte is still expecting to hit the $100 price point next year. Of course, by three cycles, they don't make them anymore, which is why you don't see any $20 486 laptops these days.
I did some quick calculations, and I'm estimating that your line of nekkid peepulz would cost about $211,000,000/year to operate, in labor costs alone, without providing a whole lot in the way of speed or throughput.
Wind power prices are falling quickly, and are already down to $0.04-$0.07/kwh (very close to coal's $0.03-$0.04/kwh). Thanks to a new photovoltaics material called copper indium gallium selenide, the cost of solar is set to drop to a tenth its current cost (from $0.20-$0.30/kwh to $0.02-$0.03/kwh, slightly cheaper than coal). Cadmium telluride also appears promising, but CIGS is getting all the VC money right now.
To head off the vaporware argument: a company called Nanosolar is out there, well funded, and building a huge plant in San Jose. When completed (sometime in 2008) it's expected to spit out over 400MW of panels every year.
So even if there was a ban on new or expanding coal plants (or a slow phaseout of existing plants), there is a firm limit to how much energy prices can rise, even limiting ourselves to proven tech. Throw in near-term advances in solar, and the greener tech is also the cheaper tech.
Only a fast ban (say, a complete ban by 2027) would send electricity prices "through the roof".
Slashdot Mirror
Out of curiosity, two questions:
1) Are you familiar enough with accounting to categorically state that no large differences in talent and performance exist?
2) You seem to assume that, as a general case, because the programmer is an insufferable asshole, he necessarily has superior skills. Has that been your experience in the field?
4L/100km??? Speak English, dammit!
Bah! Cheap, shoddy reimplementations of iTunes and the Windows GUI!
Half-joking there. Pinning down what constitutes "innovation" is hard under normal circumstances, and impossible when making the case to someone trying to defend a "X isn't innovative" thesis. It's like showing a creationist an Archaeopteryx as proof of evolutionary innovation, and having them dismiss it as a mere feathery lizard.
I consider Firefox pretty innovative, but it's still doing the same thing Mosaic was in the early nineties: rendering web pages. Innovation, or mere refinement?
Ruby on Rails: innovative? or a mere incremental improvement over the many frameworks that came before?
Another thing I'd add: given the volume of innovation taking place at the edges of technology, is it really the best time to start "innovating" around with the operating systems that support them? If the changes can be abstracted away so that applications don't see a difference, then such improvements are probably not sufficiently innovative. If they can't be, then adoption is hindered, and will be so long as the lower layers are seen as sufficient to support higher level activity. Look how little innovation has gone into the TCP/IP stack, despite its inadequacies. We can't even transition to IPv6, much less scrap it in favor of "innovative" approaches to internetworking.
There are lots of neat ideas out there, but a lot of innovation just can't fit existing frameworks.
Open source just wasn't around in its current form back when the basics of computer interaction were being laid down.
But, if we didn't control the world, wouldn't all that wealth just go to poor people, who would blow it on alcohol and cable TV?
Jesus. If you don't think Americans should govern the world and control its resources, that's like saying that we're not really God's chosen people. Why do you think Americans say they're the freest nation on Earth? It's because we're not only free to choose our own destiny, but free to choose everyone else's as well!
Why? Why do you hate your country so?
Wow. Persecution complex much?
Yeah, poor kid of yours, who is discriminated against because her parents have the resources to buy her an OLPC themselves, or any of the competing ubercheap laptops. My heart weeps for the poor girl, it really does.
I suppose your child has earned herself an OLPC, by having the self-discipline and foresight to be born to comparatively rich parents.
If you think a kid-friendly laptop would benefit her, buy her one. The G1G1 program is still open. Oh, wait, you don't want any of your hard-earned money going to one of those undeserving kids. You'd rather wait until somebody mugs a Nigerian slum kid for you and puts it up on eBay.
Regarding the technical support thing: Nobody gets technical support from the OLPC. Not G1G1 donors, not nobody. Hell, even spare parts won't be available for another month or so. Purchasing government agencies bear the burden of handling repairs, which is why the designers worked so hard to make repairs easy.
P.S.: Peru is in South America, not Africa.
P.P.S: Yeah, I've been trolled. We've both proven that we have no lives, so I don't see how that makes you the winner here.
I was impressed too. The first time I installed and fired up emacs, it popped up with this impossibly tiny text. I leaned in really close, and lo and behold, the text was perfectly sharp.
This little guy just blows me away.
Nah, I couldn't wait for Christmas.
I've never heard anyone, anywhere, claim that CFLs contain lead. Source?
As for the mercury issue, you're blowing it way out of proportion. See my first comment to this story for more details.
Don't worry. Global warming will soon get rid of those pesky "40 degrees or less" conditions.
Coal also contains mercury. Enough mercury that swapping an incandescent out for a CFL significantly reduces the amount of mercury released into the environment. Add in the fact that bulbs can be recycled (and very likely would be, if a $.50/bulb "return fee" were slapped onto the initial cost of each bulb) and the mercury issue is pretty well solved.
At this point, CFL skeptics sometimes drag out the story of a woman who paid thousands of dollars to have her apartment cleared of hazardous materials after she had a bulb break. But that was a simple case of acting on bad advice. The real solution is to open the windows, sweep the bulb into a plastic bag, vacuum up the remaining dust, and take the bag to a recycling facility.
Or just lick it up. My understanding is that a CFL has about as much mercury as thirty servings of tuna (the difference being that the tuna's mercury is bioavailable).
Don't credit the Founding Fathers for that. There is nothing in the Constitution about Senate filibusters. It's just a rule the Senate chose to adopt, and one that they could throw out at any time. Remember a couple of years ago, with the whole "nuclear option"? The Republicans were considering eliminating filibusters of judicial nominees, a rash act, but not an unconstitutional one.
If someone only comments on one topic (on a general discussion forum), it is at least a weak indicator that the person may only be there to promote an agenda. Usually a reading of a poster's history will turn up at least a few other interests.
In daveschroeder's case, he also seems to be a Mac geek, but mostly his primary purpose in participating seems to be the noble defense of entrenched interests.
Your problem is that you're taking an expression of spun's frustration, and trying to interpret it as a new logical dictum. The truth is, humans can't be perfectly logical, because we have neither the neural hardware nor the time to weigh each new argument without consideration of the source. In the real world, reputation matters. Someone who has tried to spin you over and over in the past is likely to try again in the future.
Also, an information source must generate new information in order to be worth engaging. If you notice that a given source tends to always discuss the same few topics, always taking the same viewpoint, using the same rhetorical tactics, you'll eventually stop learning much from that source. This is why I don't read Cal Thomas anymore. It's not that he's right-wing on every single issue; I ignore him because I know that I'm just in for a tired rehashing of points I could rattle off myself, plus a couple of well worn smears against liberals (which, again, I could rattle off myself). At least George Will gives me an occasional "Hmmm... I'd never considered that before." It sounds like spun has reached that point with daveschroeder, and vice versa. They're no longer interested in convincing the other, but simply desire to sway bystanders who might be taken in by their adversary's rhetorical skills.
As for the "incivility" betrayed by the left's treatment of General Petraeus, I feel we were justified in treating his status report with extreme skepticism. Not just because he was reporting on the success of his own strategy. Not just because the Bush administration has a history of making appointments based more on loyalty than competence, while removing people too willing to give bad news. Like every other department in the government, the Bush administration has succeeded in politicizing the military to an unprecedented degree. Petraeus, among other things, wrote a strongly upbeat editorial about the progress being made in Iraq, in the weeks before the 2004 election (when they were still running the old, failing strategy that Petraeus eventually had to be brought in to fix). In August, when he was giving his report, he spent most of his time fielding softballs from right-wing commentators. I think the Bush administration and his congressional allies used the military's reputation as a non-partisan institution to deflect criticism from Petraeus' partisan activities, to the detriment of both the military and the American people.
But how dare we highlight the matter with a tasteless pun.
After growing up believing that Mormons encountered persecution in Missouri and elsewhere because the Missourians were stirred up by Satan, a little bit of one-sidedness is needed to achieve a semblance of balance.
I don't think the Mormons did anything to warrant expulsion, and there were plenty of misunderstandings and hard feelings to go around. But if you insist on believing that the early Mormons are blameless for the hatred that they engendered, your picture of the time period is incomplete.
http://www.lds-mormon.com/tmpc.shtml
Gov. Boggs' "extermination order" was reprehensible, but it was issued not because of Mormon "beliefs," but because he had reason to believe (after the Battle of Crooked River) that the Mormons were in open rebellion against the state of Missouri. It is important to remember that it was Sidney Rigdon who first used the word "extermination" in reference to the conflict between Mormons and Missouri.
Our capacity for self-delusion is enormous. If you'd made a life-ruining decision based on a belief, it would be very hard to accept information that invalidated that belief.
Plus, the guy sounds like he's gone totally spare.
Given the prevalence of prison rape, and how little is done to stop it, I'm not convinced that society doesn't share his sense of justice.
Thanks. I was under the impression that everyone connected to the Nigerian financial world had died in one plane crash or another.
Yeah, yeah. This is like saying, "Every day, I give that same bum a nickel, and he never seems to get himself cleaned up. Must be blowing it all on booze." We have never sent enough aid to make a dent, and when we have it's often been in useless forms. Worse, if you calculate every penny of aid the West has sent to Africa, and then subtract the value of the resources we've extracted from the continent at firesale prices, the payments we demand for loans that went straight into the bank accounts of deposed dictators, and the "free trade" agreements we've inflicted on them to their detriment, they'd be far better off if the industrialized world had left them alone.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, former Finance Minister of Nigeria? Didn't he die in a plane crash?
I'm still trying to master the crippleboard. Carpal tunnel has driven me to extreme measures. I'm down to about 25 WPM, from about 60 on QWERTY (-- that was unusually hard to type). But on the upside, I can still switch back when I need to, and I'm speeding up steadily.
IOW, the conversion hasn't been too painful thus far.
Sugar is the only really non-standard piece, and that shouldn't add significantly to the overall costs.
You also claim that this "non-standardness" makes it less useful as an educational tool. You make it sound like the OLPC's purpose is to teach programming, which simply isn't the case. Hell, its primary purpose isn't even computer literacy. But it does come with several language interpreters, and I'm guessing a really ambitious student would be able to get a C++ compiler running on it. I'm just not seeing the problem, unless you're of the "if the kids aren't learning Windows, MS Office, and MS Visual Studio, they aren't learning" mindset.Which is why Negroponte is still expecting to hit the $100 price point next year. Of course, by three cycles, they don't make them anymore, which is why you don't see any $20 486 laptops these days.
The Schmaily Schmow had good ratings a few months back, before they put their archives online.
Today, everyone I know has stopped watching it.
Coincidence? I think not!
I did some quick calculations, and I'm estimating that your line of nekkid peepulz would cost about $211,000,000/year to operate, in labor costs alone, without providing a whole lot in the way of speed or throughput.
Wind power prices are falling quickly, and are already down to $0.04-$0.07/kwh (very close to coal's $0.03-$0.04/kwh). Thanks to a new photovoltaics material called copper indium gallium selenide, the cost of solar is set to drop to a tenth its current cost (from $0.20-$0.30/kwh to $0.02-$0.03/kwh, slightly cheaper than coal). Cadmium telluride also appears promising, but CIGS is getting all the VC money right now.
To head off the vaporware argument: a company called Nanosolar is out there, well funded, and building a huge plant in San Jose. When completed (sometime in 2008) it's expected to spit out over 400MW of panels every year.
So even if there was a ban on new or expanding coal plants (or a slow phaseout of existing plants), there is a firm limit to how much energy prices can rise, even limiting ourselves to proven tech. Throw in near-term advances in solar, and the greener tech is also the cheaper tech.
Only a fast ban (say, a complete ban by 2027) would send electricity prices "through the roof".