Since when does it cost money to have your ass hauled into court? Is it the price of the defense attorney alone? Do you really NEED a lawyer, what about pleading your case yourself.. "
Most judges, being lawyers themselves, look down upon people who represent themselves. I know of two people who represented themselves in court and, basically, the judge said "I don't want to hear your side of the case, you should have brought a lawyer" and told them to sit down and shut up. They lost. Morally this is indeed outrageous, but there's not much a non-lawyer can do. We don't know the the steps to the dance, so they just won't let us dance. They can usually use your ignorance of protocol to totally shut you out of the proceedings, all of it perfectly legal, which means you're royally screwed. Lawyers have constructed a legal system of such abominable complexity that gives them guaranteed job security. So yes, you really do need a lawyer.
Good information! I like what you have to say...but still, why all these massive blackouts?
If I agree that they are random, then you must tell me WHAT is causing them.:)
Personally, I think it's just what happens with complex systems like the power grid. Most of the time, small failures result in small problems, but occasionally small problems happen in the exact worst place at the worst time and POW! big chunks of the system godown. It's statistically unlikely that if you shuffle a deck of cards that they'll end up in numerical order bv suit, but if you do it enough times, it will happen. Same thing with multiple, unrelated, large power failures. Some might call it "bad luck", but it's actually a statistical inevitability.You gotta have SOMETHING living at the ends of the Bell Curve.
Do you have to pay any telephone operator regulatory charges now?
Do you sell your VoIP services to end users?
If you answered yes to either/both of those, then you probably are affected. If a company is a telephone provider, regardless of the trasmission mechanism used, then they should have to play using the same set of rules/regulations as the other telephone providers.
The problem is, the defenition of "telephone provider" gets pretty fuzzy in this area. I could, for example, own a 10-story building and equip it with a used AT&T switch fed by a couple T1's and reserve a block of, say, 250 Direct In-Dial numbers. Then I could provide service to my tenants by issuing them a number from the DID pool switched in and out through those T1's and charge them monthly for it. It's essentially the same as having a PBX-type phone system. I'd basically be taxed on those 48 lines the two T1's represent, not the 250 phone numbers I have reserved. Why? Because I'm never going to be using more than 48 lines worth of capacity at any one time. The 250 numbers are simply addressing, not service. So with VOIP, you're doing the same thing, only rather than selling it in one building, you're selling it everywhere and delivering it via the internet. Essentially, it could be argued that VOIP is the equivalent of selling access to one of the extensions on the company's telephone system. Companies don't pay tax based on the number of extensions on their system, so why should VOIP providers?
Re:Gloves + table saw = bad.
on
The "Spider Case"
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Damn fool. Even with Kevlar, a table saw or router will mangle the finger and possibly rip it off...
Reminds me of a picture I once saw of an engineer for the space program in the 1960's. It was captioned something like "the schedule was so tight the engineers were working on the hardware in the machine shop". It showed him standing over a milling machine, hands on the controls, full eye protection, with his tie hanging down into the work area. I figure it had to be either a posed picture with a guy who never actually used the milling machine, or maybe it was done on purpose as an inside joke. Since then I've tried several times to goad engineers into using my milling machine while wearing a tie, but so far they've all balked...
We tend to focus too much on the news of the moment. If we have a bunch of blackouts, all that will happen is we'll work real hard and turn the power back on.
Although the sequence of blackouts is an odd coincidence. Mebbe somebody's playing a trick.
Nah, that's just the way it works. Things might happen at a statistically average rate, but the actual occurrences tend to be disorderly and will appear "clumped". It's a lot like when Mandelbrot noticed that data transmission errors happened to resemble the Cantor set. Nature is disorderly. The attempt to find patterns in the disorder (a.k.a. "affix blame") is an interesting characteristic of humanity.
Not that I think we'll ever get to that point. Our proven reserves today are actually higher than they were 100 years ago.
Well yeah, 100 years ago all we knew about was those few oil sources which were fairly obvious. The real kicker is that proven reserves are higher now than they were 30 years ago. Interestingly, around 1910 there was an "oil crisis" where they estimated that there was only enough oil in the world to last another 5-10 years. History repeats itself, but Iguess it has to because nobody listens to it.
Didn't you get all that stuff in school about how we were going to run out of gas/petrol/coal/etc in around 2002-2020. Strangely nobody has mentioned that in the last 5 years, that could well be because it was wrong or perhaps teachers were asked not to mention it for some reason.
It's because reserves of coal/oil that were deemed uneconomic in the 70's can now be mined because of (a) improvements in technique and (b) people are willing to pay more for it.
That's part of it, yes, but there's more. The initial estimates of "~30 years of oil left" were erroneously based on the assumption that significant oil reserves only existed in the lower latitudes, under the theory that oil formed at the sites of pre-historic jungles and forests. When off-shore drilling became possible and they found that the North Sea oil reserves were unexpectedly huge, it was dismissed as an anomoly. But then Alaska was found to have enormous oil reserves, as was northern Canada. Suddenly, the 30-years estimate disappered and most of the theorists who espoused it pretended they never said it. Between the North Sea, Siberia, and Alaska, there's so many oil reserves (discovered and undiscovered) that no one can really come up with a credible estimate of how long it'll last. The best guess is, just as you said, about 100 years-- but then again, that's based on "just the reserves we've found, plus some more we expect to find" and "if usage increases following the same curve we've observed since ~1900". But then, as you said, there's always some wise guy with a technological trick up his sleeve who monkey wrench-es the whole estimate. Like the tar-sand extraction process that boosted Canada's "estimated reserves" by 315 billion barrels-- equal to the oil reserves in southern arabia-- increasing the global reserve estimate by some %20 and, again, clobbering all those static-model projections.
I've never seen anyone put more than 7 30 minute episodes onto a DVD-9, and even that many is very rare. Usually it's more like 4. Lets say about 7Mbits/second bitrate, 25 minutes per episode--that works out to be about 1300MB per episode.
I think the ST:TNG episodes are a full "TV hour" long, aren't they?
So, why not wheelie bars, like on a dragster, front and back. That way when the whiz-bang technology fails, you have a common sense mechanical backup.
Personally, I never saw a rational reason for the two-wheel design of the damn thing. I suspect kamen made it a silly balancing two-wheeler with no third point of contact for the dumbest reason of all: because he could. His wheelchair design is great. It can balance on two wheels to climb stairs and curbs, but notice that it spends most of its time on FOUR wheels. Kamen is a typical Genius-Dumbass. So enamored is he with his own cleverness that he totally disregards common sense and overlooks what look to me to be obvious safety issues.
How the flying fuck do you figure that? You Gun nuts crack me up.
Give me one example, since the 2nd Amendment was inacted, of a group of people using firearms to protect themselves from the Government and winning. Yeah, thats a real useful amendment.
Crimony, are you daft? It's quite obvious the purpose of the 2nd amendment is to ensure that the population is capable of defending itself from foreign and domestic threats. If you look back to when the constitution was written and who wrote it, it's also obvious that one of these threats could be the government itself. Remember, the US had just formed after having a revolution against the government. They wanted to ensure that, should the government ever get unreasonable again, the people would be in a position to do it again. The reason you haven't seen any group successfully protect themselves from the gov't with firearms is that there's been no group large enough. Waco, Ruby Ridge, etc. were small groups of people with fairly unpopular beliefs. The gov't may have been ham-fisted in those cases, but the victims weren't "popular" enopugh to cause an outcry. If a mainstream-enough cause was violently crushed by jackbooted gov't thugs often enough, you'd likely start to see popular uprising, some of it ARMED. The fact that we ARE armed is part of what keeps the gov'r from trying any sudden, draconian moves. Admittedly, they've managed to institute some pretty nasty things, but they've had to do it slowly and carefully.
My girlfriend was once an anti gun person who didn't see the point of the 2nd amendment. She says she was convinced to change her stance by a friend of hers who put to her the following question:
"Do you really think it'd be better if only the police had guns?"
I am not disagreeing with you. I'm just pointing out that sometimes, we are arguing over trivial issues, considering there is a big ton of spending that we are ignoring - the spending on WARFARE.
The problem is, the fact that the government spends money on weapons is totally irrelevant to the discussion, be that discussion "trivial" or not. Following your "logic", all debates would devolve into a pissing match over which issue is the most important, and nothing would get done. While I agree that what the gov't spends money on is more important an issue than whether or not scientists are are swayed by the lure of grant money, it's still totally beside the point. I think that torture in Chinese prisons is even more important and issue than gov't spending, but you don't see me interrupting discussions about Linux with comments like "how can you talk about Samba 3.0 when there are prisoners being beaten in Beijing". Get the idea?
Now, granted, there is no right to privacy guaranteed in the constitution, but through precedent, it is a *well* established right.
Excellent post. I should like to add that those who would claim that the "right to privacy" isn't a real right because the US Constitution doesn't mention it, well they need to refer to the 9th amendment:
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
In other words, just because they didn't put it on their "top ten list", that doesn't mean it don't exist.
As opposed to what? That money being spent on Bombs and Missiles?
Christ Almighty, I didn't say that the grant money thing was good or bad, only that grant money doesn't get handed out to scientists who say "the climate's fine, can I have money to study it?" Take your damn soapbox elsewhere, troll.
If vi had a marketing buzzword guy, you should be it.
I find your referring to "marketing buzzword guy" as an "it" quite amusing.
Brings to mind Buffalo Bill looking down into a hole in the basement floor and saying: "It comes up with more buzzwords or it doesn't go to the company picnic"
There is no up side to telling people what they do not want to hear.
Hogwash. There's no government grant money if you say "everything's fine". If you say "this might be a problem, it needs study", the money comes rolling in.
I figured that somebody (maybe Darl himself) lives there. Utah is where much of Caldera is.
Yeah, but it's not the kind of place people like Darl live. It's essentially the spot where you get off the interstate if you're coming from Southern California/Nevada and heading east to Zion or Bryce Canyon National parks, or Lake Powell (blow up the Glen Canyon Dam!). I suspect it exists as a "Last Wal-Mart Before the National Parks" type of town.
Have you been using them while plugged into an outlet without taking out the battery? I've seen more people kill their batteries by doing that than I can count.
If you take the battery out every time you plug the laptop into the wall, how is it supposed to recharge. Seems like YOUR way gives me one use of the battry and that's all.
Re:which taxes? Income taxes? Social Security tax?
on
Tech Rich Get Richer
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· Score: 1
Well, since the tax cut is financed by a deficit, it is giving money away; or more correctly, transferring money from future taxpayers to today's taxpayers, with a little extra interest paid to the rich (and foreigners) who are financing the cut.
The deficit is financing government spending, not the tax cut. The notion that tax cuts are "paid for" by the government implies that it's the government's money, not the taxpayers. But anyway, the real issue here is tax revenues vs. gov't spending. If the gov't is spending too much, why is it automatically assumed that the only way to fix the problem is to tax people higher? When's the last time the gov't had to tighten its belt and do away with a few "non necessities"? Why is it that we are expected to be fiscally responsible, while the government isn't?
As far as "reeking" of redistribution, what's wrong with that? Aren't we all part of a society? Aren't the strong supposed to help the weak? Shouldn't the lucky help the unlucky?
Yes, but not at gunpoint. Large, centralized governments are possibly the worst institutions to hand over our societal responsibilities to. Large bureaucracies don't care about people. The best way to help society is at the personal, or maybe up to community level. People helping people directly. Redistributionist governments siphon off half the money to perpetuate themselves, and the other half is handed out without any thought to individual need. This system aggravates both the taxpayer and the needy. The needy are angry that the government isn't addressing their actual need, and the taxpayer sees a bunch of lazy unemployed people and says "the government should do something about that". If the government got out of the charity business, people would be a lot more willing to help their neighbors because, hey, who else is going to do it. GOvernment charity is actually a society breaker.
I think there should be a ceiling on the amount of wealth an individual can amass... enough to give people incentives to be creative and useful, but far far less than billions of dollars. I'm thinking something like 10 million.
Creative? Yes. Useful? No. They'd just stuff all their net worth into offshore holding companies. And why 10 million? That's not very much in terms of "wealthy". Does this mean that all lottery pots will be capped a $10M too?
Re:which taxes? Income taxes? Social Security tax?
on
Tech Rich Get Richer
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· Score: 1
Which is better, giving the money to the rich for them to invest in products they think people will buy; or giving the money to people to spend, and thereby directly showing what products they are interested in buying?
The fundamental problem with your theory here is the notion that a tax cut is "giving" people money. It's not; it's "not taking away". If you're cutting taxes, those that pay the most should be getting the biggest break. People who pay little or no taxes should, logically, get little or no break. Anything else reeks of redistributionism.
1/3? I don't know what tax bracket you're in, but after Fed, SS, Medicare, State, Local, property tax, Sales tax, auto registration, and other various fees, most of us in the U.S. pay over 50% of our salaries to the gov.
In a word, no we don't. Not if by "most of us" you mean "most US taxpayers". For a decently readable account of this and other economic "facts", there's a piece in the NY Times (free registration blah blah).
In another word, YES WE DO. The NY Times article is about income taxes. When you add in fuel, sales, and SS taxes, it starts to look more like 50%.
HOw about we concentrate on basic human needs like food, clean, running water and shelter before we go doling out handhelds to people?
I'm not at all against technology education and maximizing its use wherever possible, but there truly are some things that must take priority here.
"we"? Where do you get this "we" from? The Simputer is manufactured by a for-profit corporation in India. Are you saying that they (a bunch of tech guys, obviously) should have gone into the food water and housing business? Or are you saying that "we"-- as in all of humanity-- should drop whatever we're doing and rush to the aid of the hungry, thirsty, and homeless? Yeah, that would work. Both scenarios are ridiculous, so maybe you meant something else?
isn't there a better way to provide computing technology to the third-world masses? perhaps someone should start a program for donating old, outdated computers for the good of poorer nations. (if there isn't already one)
[eyeroll]
Didn't any of y'all RTFA? The Simputer isn't a 1:1 replacement for a desktop machine. It has a modem, GSM/CDMA interface, and GPS system built in. It runs on batteries. Figured out what it is yet? It's a PDA. It's not meant to be a tool for teaching children how to write "hello world" programs in turbo pascal. It's meant to provide usefull computing resources to the general population in their own language. You're not going to fill it's intended niche by mailing them your crappy eMachines celeron box.
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Most judges, being lawyers themselves, look down upon people who represent themselves. I know of two people who represented themselves in court and, basically, the judge said "I don't want to hear your side of the case, you should have brought a lawyer" and told them to sit down and shut up. They lost. Morally this is indeed outrageous, but there's not much a non-lawyer can do. We don't know the the steps to the dance, so they just won't let us dance. They can usually use your ignorance of protocol to totally shut you out of the proceedings, all of it perfectly legal, which means you're royally screwed. Lawyers have constructed a legal system of such abominable complexity that gives them guaranteed job security. So yes, you really do need a lawyer.
Personally, I think it's just what happens with complex systems like the power grid. Most of the time, small failures result in small problems, but occasionally small problems happen in the exact worst place at the worst time and POW! big chunks of the system godown. It's statistically unlikely that if you shuffle a deck of cards that they'll end up in numerical order bv suit, but if you do it enough times, it will happen. Same thing with multiple, unrelated, large power failures. Some might call it "bad luck", but it's actually a statistical inevitability.You gotta have SOMETHING living at the ends of the Bell Curve.
If you answered yes to either/both of those, then you probably are affected. If a company is a telephone provider, regardless of the trasmission mechanism used, then they should have to play using the same set of rules/regulations as the other telephone providers.
The problem is, the defenition of "telephone provider" gets pretty fuzzy in this area. I could, for example, own a 10-story building and equip it with a used AT&T switch fed by a couple T1's and reserve a block of, say, 250 Direct In-Dial numbers. Then I could provide service to my tenants by issuing them a number from the DID pool switched in and out through those T1's and charge them monthly for it. It's essentially the same as having a PBX-type phone system. I'd basically be taxed on those 48 lines the two T1's represent, not the 250 phone numbers I have reserved. Why? Because I'm never going to be using more than 48 lines worth of capacity at any one time. The 250 numbers are simply addressing, not service. So with VOIP, you're doing the same thing, only rather than selling it in one building, you're selling it everywhere and delivering it via the internet. Essentially, it could be argued that VOIP is the equivalent of selling access to one of the extensions on the company's telephone system. Companies don't pay tax based on the number of extensions on their system, so why should VOIP providers?
Reminds me of a picture I once saw of an engineer for the space program in the 1960's. It was captioned something like "the schedule was so tight the engineers were working on the hardware in the machine shop". It showed him standing over a milling machine, hands on the controls, full eye protection, with his tie hanging down into the work area. I figure it had to be either a posed picture with a guy who never actually used the milling machine, or maybe it was done on purpose as an inside joke. Since then I've tried several times to goad engineers into using my milling machine while wearing a tie, but so far they've all balked...
Although the sequence of blackouts is an odd coincidence. Mebbe somebody's playing a trick.
Nah, that's just the way it works. Things might happen at a statistically average rate, but the actual occurrences tend to be disorderly and will appear "clumped". It's a lot like when Mandelbrot noticed that data transmission errors happened to resemble the Cantor set. Nature is disorderly. The attempt to find patterns in the disorder (a.k.a. "affix blame") is an interesting characteristic of humanity.
Well yeah, 100 years ago all we knew about was those few oil sources which were fairly obvious. The real kicker is that proven reserves are higher now than they were 30 years ago. Interestingly, around 1910 there was an "oil crisis" where they estimated that there was only enough oil in the world to last another 5-10 years. History repeats itself, but Iguess it has to because nobody listens to it.
It's because reserves of coal/oil that were deemed uneconomic in the 70's can now be mined because of (a) improvements in technique and (b) people are willing to pay more for it.
That's part of it, yes, but there's more. The initial estimates of "~30 years of oil left" were erroneously based on the assumption that significant oil reserves only existed in the lower latitudes, under the theory that oil formed at the sites of pre-historic jungles and forests. When off-shore drilling became possible and they found that the North Sea oil reserves were unexpectedly huge, it was dismissed as an anomoly. But then Alaska was found to have enormous oil reserves, as was northern Canada. Suddenly, the 30-years estimate disappered and most of the theorists who espoused it pretended they never said it. Between the North Sea, Siberia, and Alaska, there's so many oil reserves (discovered and undiscovered) that no one can really come up with a credible estimate of how long it'll last. The best guess is, just as you said, about 100 years-- but then again, that's based on "just the reserves we've found, plus some more we expect to find" and "if usage increases following the same curve we've observed since ~1900". But then, as you said, there's always some wise guy with a technological trick up his sleeve who monkey wrench-es the whole estimate. Like the tar-sand extraction process that boosted Canada's "estimated reserves" by 315 billion barrels-- equal to the oil reserves in southern arabia-- increasing the global reserve estimate by some %20 and, again, clobbering all those static-model projections.
True, Cisco deserves a few props for that, but NOBODY should get any slack when they violate the GPL for commercial gain. That's just not cool.
I think the ST:TNG episodes are a full "TV hour" long, aren't they?
Personally, I never saw a rational reason for the two-wheel design of the damn thing. I suspect kamen made it a silly balancing two-wheeler with no third point of contact for the dumbest reason of all: because he could. His wheelchair design is great. It can balance on two wheels to climb stairs and curbs, but notice that it spends most of its time on FOUR wheels. Kamen is a typical Genius-Dumbass. So enamored is he with his own cleverness that he totally disregards common sense and overlooks what look to me to be obvious safety issues.
Crimony, are you daft? It's quite obvious the purpose of the 2nd amendment is to ensure that the population is capable of defending itself from foreign and domestic threats. If you look back to when the constitution was written and who wrote it, it's also obvious that one of these threats could be the government itself. Remember, the US had just formed after having a revolution against the government. They wanted to ensure that, should the government ever get unreasonable again, the people would be in a position to do it again. The reason you haven't seen any group successfully protect themselves from the gov't with firearms is that there's been no group large enough. Waco, Ruby Ridge, etc. were small groups of people with fairly unpopular beliefs. The gov't may have been ham-fisted in those cases, but the victims weren't "popular" enopugh to cause an outcry. If a mainstream-enough cause was violently crushed by jackbooted gov't thugs often enough, you'd likely start to see popular uprising, some of it ARMED. The fact that we ARE armed is part of what keeps the gov'r from trying any sudden, draconian moves. Admittedly, they've managed to institute some pretty nasty things, but they've had to do it slowly and carefully.
My girlfriend was once an anti gun person who didn't see the point of the 2nd amendment. She says she was convinced to change her stance by a friend of hers who put to her the following question:
"Do you really think it'd be better if only the police had guns?"
The problem is, the fact that the government spends money on weapons is totally irrelevant to the discussion, be that discussion "trivial" or not. Following your "logic", all debates would devolve into a pissing match over which issue is the most important, and nothing would get done. While I agree that what the gov't spends money on is more important an issue than whether or not scientists are are swayed by the lure of grant money, it's still totally beside the point. I think that torture in Chinese prisons is even more important and issue than gov't spending, but you don't see me interrupting discussions about Linux with comments like "how can you talk about Samba 3.0 when there are prisoners being beaten in Beijing". Get the idea?
Excellent post. I should like to add that those who would claim that the "right to privacy" isn't a real right because the US Constitution doesn't mention it, well they need to refer to the 9th amendment:
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
In other words, just because they didn't put it on their "top ten list", that doesn't mean it don't exist.
Christ Almighty, I didn't say that the grant money thing was good or bad, only that grant money doesn't get handed out to scientists who say "the climate's fine, can I have money to study it?" Take your damn soapbox elsewhere, troll.
I find your referring to "marketing buzzword guy" as an "it" quite amusing.
Brings to mind Buffalo Bill looking down into a hole in the basement floor and saying: "It comes up with more buzzwords or it doesn't go to the company picnic"
Hogwash. There's no government grant money if you say "everything's fine". If you say "this might be a problem, it needs study", the money comes rolling in.
Yeah, but it's not the kind of place people like Darl live. It's essentially the spot where you get off the interstate if you're coming from Southern California/Nevada and heading east to Zion or Bryce Canyon National parks, or Lake Powell (blow up the Glen Canyon Dam!). I suspect it exists as a "Last Wal-Mart Before the National Parks" type of town.
If you take the battery out every time you plug the laptop into the wall, how is it supposed to recharge. Seems like YOUR way gives me one use of the battry and that's all.
The deficit is financing government spending, not the tax cut. The notion that tax cuts are "paid for" by the government implies that it's the government's money, not the taxpayers. But anyway, the real issue here is tax revenues vs. gov't spending. If the gov't is spending too much, why is it automatically assumed that the only way to fix the problem is to tax people higher? When's the last time the gov't had to tighten its belt and do away with a few "non necessities"? Why is it that we are expected to be fiscally responsible, while the government isn't?
As far as "reeking" of redistribution, what's wrong with that? Aren't we all part of a society? Aren't the strong supposed to help the weak? Shouldn't the lucky help the unlucky?
Yes, but not at gunpoint. Large, centralized governments are possibly the worst institutions to hand over our societal responsibilities to. Large bureaucracies don't care about people. The best way to help society is at the personal, or maybe up to community level. People helping people directly. Redistributionist governments siphon off half the money to perpetuate themselves, and the other half is handed out without any thought to individual need. This system aggravates both the taxpayer and the needy. The needy are angry that the government isn't addressing their actual need, and the taxpayer sees a bunch of lazy unemployed people and says "the government should do something about that". If the government got out of the charity business, people would be a lot more willing to help their neighbors because, hey, who else is going to do it. GOvernment charity is actually a society breaker.
Creative? Yes. Useful? No. They'd just stuff all their net worth into offshore holding companies. And why 10 million? That's not very much in terms of "wealthy". Does this mean that all lottery pots will be capped a $10M too?
The fundamental problem with your theory here is the notion that a tax cut is "giving" people money. It's not; it's "not taking away". If you're cutting taxes, those that pay the most should be getting the biggest break. People who pay little or no taxes should, logically, get little or no break. Anything else reeks of redistributionism.
Time to start up the Alferd Packer memorial cafeteria.
In a word, no we don't. Not if by "most of us" you mean "most US taxpayers". For a decently readable account of this and other economic "facts", there's a piece in the NY Times (free registration blah blah).
In another word, YES WE DO. The NY Times article is about income taxes. When you add in fuel, sales, and SS taxes, it starts to look more like 50%.
"we"? Where do you get this "we" from? The Simputer is manufactured by a for-profit corporation in India. Are you saying that they (a bunch of tech guys, obviously) should have gone into the food water and housing business? Or are you saying that "we"-- as in all of humanity-- should drop whatever we're doing and rush to the aid of the hungry, thirsty, and homeless? Yeah, that would work. Both scenarios are ridiculous, so maybe you meant something else?
[eyeroll]
Didn't any of y'all RTFA? The Simputer isn't a 1:1 replacement for a desktop machine. It has a modem, GSM/CDMA interface, and GPS system built in. It runs on batteries. Figured out what it is yet? It's a PDA. It's not meant to be a tool for teaching children how to write "hello world" programs in turbo pascal. It's meant to provide usefull computing resources to the general population in their own language. You're not going to fill it's intended niche by mailing them your crappy eMachines celeron box.