On one hand, I get concerned anytime someone wants to regulate a new technology.
While this is admittedly troublesome, I'm more worried by attempts to require new technology. For example, what if a a law passes that requires everybody to get a Facebook account as a form of dgiital identification? Or what if the only way you can pay your taxes would be by downloading an official tax app? Or that every baby now has to be implanted with an RFID tag? That would be more terrifying than any law that bans (regulates) Google from indexing certain sites, teachers from "friending" their students, or adults from downloading (but not 0wning pr0nography).
Regulating new technology is less of a problem for me. After all, if it's new technology, we've survived fine without it.
Read my post below. Rereading the summary, I now have serious doubts Negroponte is behind this deployment. The Thai tablets will supposedly be running Android ICS. Negroponte's tablet deployment would have run a more conventional GNU/Linux install underneath what would most probably be the Sugar interface (Fedora-based).
Can somebody confirm if this is an official project of the same organization behind the XO laptop (One Laptop Per Child) or a local (Thai) project with a similar sounding name? I cannot find any mention of any Thai deployment in the official OLPC web site, laptop.org (Google keywords, "site:laptop.org" "thailand"). There is mention of an official One Tablet Per Child (OTPC), but the links invariably point to pilot projects in Africa (i.e. the project is still being "trial"-ed). From a blog entry dated May 2012:
Can tablets make a difference to a child learning to read for the first time, without a teacher or traditional classroom structure? That's the question we are exploring with our reading project, currently underway in Ethiopia.
[A team from the One Laptop Per Child Project] left boxed tablets in a village and within three hours the children had opened the boxes and worked out how to turn the tablets on. After just a couple of weeks of unassisted use, the children were seen competing with each when reciting the alphabet, which they learned from one of the many pre-installed apps.
There was a time Apple ran an ad campaign anchored on the slogan "Think Different". The irony, even then, was that Apple systems tended to be less configurable than mass market computers produced by the partners of the Wintel duopoly. So Apple users tended to Think Alike.
First time I've heard of such a policy, since I rarely eat at McD. But what about those kiddie parties with all those creepy mascots? Are children banned from making memories?
I'm not saying your argument as a whole isn't sound, but this isn't:
search for 26 similarities between America and Nazi Germany
With the right keywords, you can produce "evidence" that current and past US presidents are saurian aliens in disguise. It would be far easier to point out the "similarities" between the USA today and Godwin's Germany.
Though no, English quotation marks seem to be verboten.
Apparently German quotation marks and quite a few Unicode characters are verboten in Slashdot. My source says that English quotes are okay in informal situations like email. Here, for example, is a random cut-and-paste from the German Wikipedia:
Angaben, nach denen die GesamtflÃche des Komplexes bis zu 240 Quadratkilometer betrug, sind fragwürdig, weil unklar bleibt, was dabei unter "Komplex" verstanden wird.
Note how the word "Komplex" is quoted. I suspect this is a new edit that would subsequently be corrected to the corect quotation format. However, this shows that the editor found it okay to use English quotation marks in the absence of proper keyboard input support.
Wikipedia is your friend. Apparently, like an unwanted child, the company got passed around a few times, being bought by SGI, only to be spun out again. It's easy to speculate how an engineer working for an unstable company like that would have other things in mind besides designing the fastest and greatest processors.
Actually Germans can use any of several different ways of punctuating their quotations, namely (1) angled quotes that look like tiny greater/less than signs, (2) low-high quotation marks, and (3) normal "American" quotation marks.
Google needs Internet addicts, therefore moves to eliminate competing addictions.
Then Facebook should be leading the charge. Google doesn't need Internet addicts to the degree that Facebook needs them, since Google can already gather data using various others means, including those pesky images you have to decode to sign on to a lot of online services.
Science fiction stories that appear to predict the future do so only because they're already true. They're not so much predictions about the future as caricatures of the present, the modern equivalent of Aesop's fables or the biblical parables. Big Brother already existed in some form in the Soviet Union when Orwell wrote 1984 (1948). Psychohistory is behavioral psychology given a statistical twist.
You don't need complex algorithms to predict that. War inevitably produces abuses, especially where you have a recalcitrant enemy that refuses to be bombed into submission (e.g. guerilla warfare and terrorist attacks). That soldiers would go crazy in the battlefied, that some crazies would actually join the military, is a given. The genius would be in predicting the precise date when such "incidents" would occur or the gory details (e.g. instead of urinating on the bodies, the soldiers could have done something worse).
My worry is that the young participants would see this as the sort of bribe parents give their kids to make them do their homework. "Hey, Junior, if you study your math, I'll take you to the theme park on Sunday."
That would be the irony of it, that Mozilla, whose browser succeeded because of users opting to "Get Firefox", would succeed in its phone OS venture only through the support of monopolies. Carriers already selling cheap or prepaid plans could offer Firefox OS as an alternative to plain dumb phones.
$1000 isn't low for what's probably a bug too minor to win, say, a Chrome or Firefox bounty. Besides, the goal is to get kids into thinking about security, not to give them jobs as penetration testers or elite hax0rs.
If the final ruling goes against Microsoft it could set an ugly precedent that an OS must forever remain backward compatible to whatever version some developer used in its earliest version.
Not necessarily. If the change is well-documented, then it is up to the developer to adapt to the change. The question here is that Novell alleged Microsoft made undocumented changes that broke the WordPerfect codebase. Now, this would be difficult to argue in the case of GNU/Linux since the "open" code of the kernel, etc., is effectively its own documentation (even if the quality is poor).
It's also different in the case of Apple when OSX broke compatibility with applications written for System 9.x. At first Apple provided compatibility layer that allowed old software to run under their then new OS.
Whether Novell's claims are true or not is of course another matter. But the complaint is valid.
Well if you have worked in a newspaper, you'll realize that except for big name reporters, a byline is simply the credit given to the person who supplied data for a news report. This might consist simply of the basic who, why, what, how, where. The person who'd combine all this into something that isn't a mere tabulation of data would be the copy editor, who frequently goes uncredited (although I've seen news reports with a tagline like "With reporting by So-an-So).
The most "honest" bylines probably belong to a columnist or a lifestyle (useless news) section writer. Lifestyle writers have all the time to write their critical analyses of the latest Shakespeare play or why Facebook is a great way for moms to keep in touch. But for the front page, where time is of the essence, what the reporter submits is at best a rough draft.
I prefer that copyright be limited to the actual producers of the work, which could be a person or a partnership, not a corporation. Corporations could, however, be given revokable licenses by the producers of a work, that is, the "media" corporations would act merely as the distributors of the work, a task which might include both the marketing and the actual distribution to the performance venues. This would reverse the situation with regard to, say, movies, where the director or scriptwriter are the hired workers, while the studio "owns" the movie.
People like to talk about how the rich make there fortune off the backs of the working class... this guy is your poster child.
No, Dotcom at worst would be an example of the rich ripping off the rich. Rich in this case would be the **AA mob bosses, who made their fortunes off the backs of their not always working "artists".
I checked the link you provided. Nice nano motherboard, along with a puzzling photo of the younger Jobs and Gates together and the following blurb!
A Bicycle For Your Mind
Like Jobs and Gates, we believe the PC is one of the most remarkable tools humans have ever created. Great tools improve with time. They don't go away
Puzzling because the system is built to run a customized version's of Google's Linux-based Android OS. Maybe they should have included a photo of Torvalds or the Google dynamic duo?
Besides, isn't Apple more like a Rolls Royce for the mind, and Microsoft, more like a train, crowded and perhaps dangerous at times, but gets you to work?
Remember how the OLPC "inspired" Asus to bring out the EeePC and thus started the NetBook revolution (subsequently nipped by the iPad)? The EeePC being the beefier machine, even if the specs were underwhelming to the power user, Asus managed to steal the thunder and the sales away from the OLPC. Will the Raspberry Pi inspire a similar revolution in ultra-small form factor motherboards? I know my next motherboard won't be larger than mini-ITX, but I would be willing to shell a few extra bucks to have a full-powered, if not full-featured, desktop computer no larger than a consumer router.
Slashdot Mirror
While this is admittedly troublesome, I'm more worried by attempts to require new technology. For example, what if a a law passes that requires everybody to get a Facebook account as a form of dgiital identification? Or what if the only way you can pay your taxes would be by downloading an official tax app? Or that every baby now has to be implanted with an RFID tag? That would be more terrifying than any law that bans (regulates) Google from indexing certain sites, teachers from "friending" their students, or adults from downloading (but not 0wning pr0nography).
Regulating new technology is less of a problem for me. After all, if it's new technology, we've survived fine without it.
Ah, the joy of reselling a product that's never been used.
Read my post below. Rereading the summary, I now have serious doubts Negroponte is behind this deployment. The Thai tablets will supposedly be running Android ICS. Negroponte's tablet deployment would have run a more conventional GNU/Linux install underneath what would most probably be the Sugar interface (Fedora-based).
There was a time Apple ran an ad campaign anchored on the slogan "Think Different". The irony, even then, was that Apple systems tended to be less configurable than mass market computers produced by the partners of the Wintel duopoly. So Apple users tended to Think Alike.
First time I've heard of such a policy, since I rarely eat at McD. But what about those kiddie parties with all those creepy mascots? Are children banned from making memories?
No, I think Redmond timed it for Halloween. It won't be the first time they'd be releasing something close to that day.
With the right keywords, you can produce "evidence" that current and past US presidents are saurian aliens in disguise. It would be far easier to point out the "similarities" between the USA today and Godwin's Germany.
Apparently German quotation marks and quite a few Unicode characters are verboten in Slashdot. My source says that English quotes are okay in informal situations like email. Here, for example, is a random cut-and-paste from the German Wikipedia:
Note how the word "Komplex" is quoted. I suspect this is a new edit that would subsequently be corrected to the corect quotation format. However, this shows that the editor found it okay to use English quotation marks in the absence of proper keyboard input support.
Wikipedia is your friend. Apparently, like an unwanted child, the company got passed around a few times, being bought by SGI, only to be spun out again. It's easy to speculate how an engineer working for an unstable company like that would have other things in mind besides designing the fastest and greatest processors.
Actually Germans can use any of several different ways of punctuating their quotations, namely (1) angled quotes that look like tiny greater/less than signs, (2) low-high quotation marks, and (3) normal "American" quotation marks.
Your Google Grammarian.
Then Facebook should be leading the charge. Google doesn't need Internet addicts to the degree that Facebook needs them, since Google can already gather data using various others means, including those pesky images you have to decode to sign on to a lot of online services.
Science fiction stories that appear to predict the future do so only because they're already true. They're not so much predictions about the future as caricatures of the present, the modern equivalent of Aesop's fables or the biblical parables. Big Brother already existed in some form in the Soviet Union when Orwell wrote 1984 (1948). Psychohistory is behavioral psychology given a statistical twist.
You don't need complex algorithms to predict that. War inevitably produces abuses, especially where you have a recalcitrant enemy that refuses to be bombed into submission (e.g. guerilla warfare and terrorist attacks). That soldiers would go crazy in the battlefied, that some crazies would actually join the military, is a given. The genius would be in predicting the precise date when such "incidents" would occur or the gory details (e.g. instead of urinating on the bodies, the soldiers could have done something worse).
My worry is that the young participants would see this as the sort of bribe parents give their kids to make them do their homework. "Hey, Junior, if you study your math, I'll take you to the theme park on Sunday."
That would be the irony of it, that Mozilla, whose browser succeeded because of users opting to "Get Firefox", would succeed in its phone OS venture only through the support of monopolies. Carriers already selling cheap or prepaid plans could offer Firefox OS as an alternative to plain dumb phones.
Not if you're using base 4.
$1000 isn't low for what's probably a bug too minor to win, say, a Chrome or Firefox bounty. Besides, the goal is to get kids into thinking about security, not to give them jobs as penetration testers or elite hax0rs.
Not necessarily. If the change is well-documented, then it is up to the developer to adapt to the change. The question here is that Novell alleged Microsoft made undocumented changes that broke the WordPerfect codebase. Now, this would be difficult to argue in the case of GNU/Linux since the "open" code of the kernel, etc., is effectively its own documentation (even if the quality is poor).
It's also different in the case of Apple when OSX broke compatibility with applications written for System 9.x. At first Apple provided compatibility layer that allowed old software to run under their then new OS.
Whether Novell's claims are true or not is of course another matter. But the complaint is valid.
Well if you have worked in a newspaper, you'll realize that except for big name reporters, a byline is simply the credit given to the person who supplied data for a news report. This might consist simply of the basic who, why, what, how, where. The person who'd combine all this into something that isn't a mere tabulation of data would be the copy editor, who frequently goes uncredited (although I've seen news reports with a tagline like "With reporting by So-an-So).
The most "honest" bylines probably belong to a columnist or a lifestyle (useless news) section writer. Lifestyle writers have all the time to write their critical analyses of the latest Shakespeare play or why Facebook is a great way for moms to keep in touch. But for the front page, where time is of the essence, what the reporter submits is at best a rough draft.
I prefer that copyright be limited to the actual producers of the work, which could be a person or a partnership, not a corporation. Corporations could, however, be given revokable licenses by the producers of a work, that is, the "media" corporations would act merely as the distributors of the work, a task which might include both the marketing and the actual distribution to the performance venues. This would reverse the situation with regard to, say, movies, where the director or scriptwriter are the hired workers, while the studio "owns" the movie.
No, Dotcom at worst would be an example of the rich ripping off the rich. Rich in this case would be the **AA mob bosses, who made their fortunes off the backs of their not always working "artists".
Puzzling because the system is built to run a customized version's of Google's Linux-based Android OS. Maybe they should have included a photo of Torvalds or the Google dynamic duo?
Besides, isn't Apple more like a Rolls Royce for the mind, and Microsoft, more like a train, crowded and perhaps dangerous at times, but gets you to work?
Remember how the OLPC "inspired" Asus to bring out the EeePC and thus started the NetBook revolution (subsequently nipped by the iPad)? The EeePC being the beefier machine, even if the specs were underwhelming to the power user, Asus managed to steal the thunder and the sales away from the OLPC. Will the Raspberry Pi inspire a similar revolution in ultra-small form factor motherboards? I know my next motherboard won't be larger than mini-ITX, but I would be willing to shell a few extra bucks to have a full-powered, if not full-featured, desktop computer no larger than a consumer router.