People should also have freedom to tell others on a forum what (and why) they believe others should donate their cycles to;)... you can simply choose not to listen to them. Nobody is 'forcing' anyone, yay freedom!
Personally I say "Go Folding!!" but I'm biased, I am at risk of inheriting (and have in my family) a currently uncurable and fatal deadly protein misfolding disease which has the potential to help be cured by that kind of research --- so for me there is even a sense of urgency in the matter.
I certainly don't think SETI@Home is pointless, however, I do agree that Folding@Home should take MUCH higher priority at this point in human history, as it can have a direct impact on helping to cure diseases which affect millions of people today (including probably hundreds if not thousands of slashdotters)... I'd rather see people first focus on that kind of research, and then later we can worry about finding alien radio signals, which if they are there now will probably still be there ten or twenty years from now.
I think you got modded unfairly here; I don't think this is flamebait, you may have a valid point - I've seen exactly this kind of thing MANY MANY times now, here in Africa and also all over the world - one or more people parade as heroes trying to do some good, manage to get lots of funding, then produce little or nothing, and move on to something else and repeat the cycle. I know people who have literally made their careers doing this.
You are technically correct, but your point has nothing to do with this LANCOR situation, since their claim is specifically about illegal use of "their" keyboard layout - nowhere does their complaint say anything about being harmed by cheap laptop dumping, nor do they represent any group of people who might have such claim.
Anyway, there is a crucially important difference between this and other forms of dumping which are actually more wrong: This is basically PRIVATE charity, it's not e.g. the US government dumping cheap computers on the 3rd world to subsidise their own industry; rather, it's private individuals using private money.
WTF? You could've at least spent three seconds Googling before posting: Nigeria has an estimated over 500 languages, many of which need special characters or [combining] diacritics (or tone markings in some casings) that can only feasibly be represented and rendered using Unicode. IMEs cater for Unicode, so this keyboard "techology" is, seemingly, nothing more than an IME that outputs certain Unicode characters or combining diacritics etc.
ASCII? Fu-gedit! That is almost as ridiculous in Nigeria as it would be expecting the Chinese to type Chinese with ASCII.
Check out Languages of Nigeria at Wikipedia. It already becomes clear even with e.g. "Oyo" on that very page that ASCII ain't gonna cut it; follow a few more links further to others e.g. Yoruba, Edo, Hausa (also note Arabic 'ajami' representation) - these are just the simple ones.
(Note I'm not the GP poster here), are you saying you live in Australia, or are from there but don't? According to your homepage, do you. Australia is not an "underdeveloped country"; it's another Western country, and as such has more in common with other Western countries like the US, UK etc. than other nations/cultures/countries. I very much doubt Aus is one of those 'childish' countries being referred to.
Are you denying that it is true though? The very existence of a "Nigerian keyboard" is only thanks to *incredible* amounts of work put in to create things like keyboards and the Unicode standard and software for easily creating IMEs and so on - countries like Nigeria have basically gotten a major free ride being able to simply directly import and use all these technologies, to massive benefit. Do you have ANY clue how much work and money went into creating Unicode alone, just one tiny component/aspect of such a system? It's mammoth, and all free to use, and yet when last did you hear one "thank you"? On the contrary, it's always just complaints about how it's not enough.
Anyway, I'm not going to convince you, let me say this instead: Dedicate your spare time for the next few years to trying to help Africa, then we'll talk again.
It's also very hard to see how this could've damaged them either way, since OLPC doesn't compete AT ALL with their keyboard - you can't exactly buy an OLPC laptop and plug it into your computer to use as a keyboard? Even if you could, it would be stupid to spend $200 on a tiny keyboard instead of $20 on a proper one. It seems pretty ridiculous to claim OLPCs might cannibalise their market, unless you can prove that somebody receiving an OLPC laptop would've bought an entire computer with their keyboard instead.
Actually, OLPCs are more likely to *grow* their market, since more children growing up who know how to use computers are eventually going to buy proper ones, and then will naturally need a Nigerian keyboard to go with that --- so actually, if OLPC used the Nigerian keyboard layout, it would encourage sales of their keyboard even more, since apart from a much larger market, all these new users would also be used to their particular layout and thus not want to change.
I suspect that sales of this keyboard are probably horribly low, so now they want to try another 'business model' (i.e. sue comparatively rich Western organisation to make a quick buck).
Just another example of the poor exploiting the rich.
Putting a bunch of Nigerian-language characters onto a keyboard doesn't qualify as an "invention"; it's exactly what's been done for hundreds of other languages around the world since before Nigerian-language characters were in the Unicode standard even (which, I might point out, that same generous West put in after working hard to create those standards in the first place and then giving them to poor countries like Nigeria for free). Perhaps the West should demand royalties from this company for using its technologies like Unicode and keyboards in the first place, haha, right.
I'm afraid this is just how things go here in Africa, and as someone else pointed out, why it'll probably remain 3rd-world indefinitely. Try give a hand to Africa, and it will demand an arm, and then try kill you for not giving the entire arm. Mod me whatever, but I've lived here all my life and seen this kind of thing over and over, facts are just facts, I wouldn't expect someone who hasn't lived here to get it.
Well, let me know when we discover the giant neural network linked to everything on the planet, sensing what's happening all over, making decisions about what it wants to do with Earth based on what's happening, and manipulating the environment to implement those decisions. Until then, I'm just going to assume that there is absolutely no such thing as Mother Nature AT ALL, no evidence for it, and just a lousy metaphor that got so out of hand that belief in it has effectively become a counterproductive pseudo-religion (honestly, too many people don't realise it's just a metaphor; I don't think it's a coincidence either that in effect all the abovementioned characteristics commonly ascribed to Mother Nature are also ascribed to God).
Many of the same surveillance capabilities in China are firmly implanted in the US also, which in theory, at least from one viewpoint, puts them "in the same club"; what makes the difference - for now - is that China readily and widely abuses its powers to implement what is effectively a fascist dictatorship (where people can and do for example commonly get 'disappeared' for merely expressing views that disagree with the government), while the US abuses its powers only minimally and has NOT actually become a fascist dictatorship. So both governments have, in theory, similar *power* to perpetrate nasty stuff (which is primarily what we're measuring here), but there are still vast differences in how that power is exercised.
I'm all for not giving governments so much power in the first place, because firstly sooner or later it is inevitable that you get corrupt governments, and secondly, power begets power and power of government seldom lessens over time, so you're always heading in the wrong direction over time.
I disagree. Even though I live in a 3rd-world country I disagree. The first world gives *massively* in many many different ways to the third world, seriously.
It's just you. Seriously, calm down and take a few deep breaths; the sheer awfulness-of-it-all you're seeing everywhere doesn't really exist. It costs $200 because that's about what it costs to build such things with current tech, that's all; it's not such a bad price for what you get; licensing and commercialising the technologies is not evil - on the contrary, by increasing distribution and scale, they can make it cheaper (and there is free market competition now from AO Asus and Intel to keep the prices low) - cheap simple computers selling in large numbers WILL help the 3rd world. Last I checked they had quite a few orders from 3rd-world countries, which ARE going to benefit (basically all (non-corrupt) free-market trade is mutually beneficial - if they weren't going to benefit, even at the current price, they wouldn't have bought it). I live in a 3rd-world country. Trust me; any cheap computer is better than no computer at all (and NO, 3rd-world countries are not "just going to make their own" - the reason they're 3rd-world is that they don't (yet) have it in them to just start making things like computers).
Of course, having a women in bed with you probably affects the amount of sleep you get more than a cellphone ever could, at least that's what I've found:)... although perhaps not so much if you've been married for a while.
... we still know extremely little (comparatively) of the details about how the brain actually works. It simply isn't possible to *know* what the effects of increased unnatural radiation might be inside the brain if we don't even know what the hell is happening inside the brain. Brains have been comparatively protected throughout our evolution too, they've seldom if ever had to deal with the particular kinds and levels and durations of EMF radiation we have now - thus it does not stand to reason that the machinery of the brain is necessarily 'tough enough' to 100% perfectly handle this stuff.
That doesn't mean that one should become hysterical and start thinking people will start dying like flies from cellphones. OBVIOUSLY that isn't happening, and NOBODY is claiming that it is. But that doesn't mean they're necessarily *perfect* and beyond even attempting to understand better.
What? A very simple Google search turns up lots of results, too many to list here even.
Cell phones have been very common for quite a long time now. If there was a correlation to cancer, there'd be a lot of dead people.
Last I checked there ARE a lot of dead people from cancer. Obviously the question is whether there are causal links in some cases, which is nearly impossible to know.
Anyway, cancer isn't the only possible effect here. There are even non-cancerous tumors, or developmental disorders - for example, we might see a few percentage increase in ADHD or dyslexia over time (in fact IIRC these are on the increase), and we'd need to do quite a bit of research to figure out if cellphones were the cause (or one of the causes) of this. Cellphones haven't even been in common use for very long; it's only for the first time in history really that we now start having a situation where many children grow up using them, so we CANNOT know the long effects yet (not you or me or anyone else on the planet can "know" - we can only conjecture based on the limited amount of scientific research that has been done).
I don't know why there are such widespread "it can't be! it can't be!" knee-jerk reactions every time someone even TRIES to scientifically investigate these things - honestly, there might be, let's just let the researchers get on with their business, the sooner we learn more the sooner we can solve the problems if there are any.
Did you know that different frequencies of electromagnetic waves have different effects on different types of materials that they strike, different levels of penetration (or reflection), different effects on different molecule types etc.? The absolute amount of energy has little to do with why such studies are interesting.
You might think there's no difference, but for one would much rather get an hour of sun at 1000 watts than an hour of X-rays at 1000 watts or an hour of (microwave-oven-frequency-radiation) at 1000 watts. Heck, even within the sun you're talking about visible light, infra-red, UV-A, UV-B etc.
Interesting; I can relate to that, but differently: It's happened to me a few times now that I've woken up with an odd 'sense' that my cellphone was ringing, and finding that it was, even though it's always on silent with vibrate off when I sleep. I don't usually wake easily. The phone is usually just less than a meter or so from my head when I sleep. The most plausible explanation to me is that my brain is noticing the changes in light levels as the screen lights up (even while I'm asleep), although it happens even during the day. Possibly the radio alarm speaker picks up slight interference which I 'hear', although I've never consciously heard that. Failing that, I wondered if the brain might somehow able to potentially learn to sense the radio interference itself - that's almost what it feels like to me.
I 100.00% grasp what you're saying - but only because I also started (and run) my own business. There are large fundamental differences between the *sacrifice* (perhaps a better word than the somewhat weak "risk"; so much more is at stake) that the business owner puts in and what a salaried employee puts in, and I don't think that any ordinary employee can ever truly appreciate or grasp what it's like without experiencing it for themselves.
But a purely Redbook Audio CD can't have rights protection on it
Perhaps that's why they're trying to kill ordinary audio CDs with this move (if you think about it, that's what it is - I for one do buy CDs legally but will never listen to them directly, it's too inconvenient, so first thing I do is rip them - now if I can't even do that legally, I'll just stop buying CDs). Who the hell listens to audio CDs directly these days? I don't know anyone who does anymore. Perhaps the RIAA wants to kill CDs and introduce a new more DRM-laden DMCA-protected distribution format that's easier for them to control - it's not like they haven't tried this before - but perhaps the timing was off; CDs are inevitably going to go the way of the dinosaur, it's only a question of when and what replaces it.
Being able to more cost-effectively light larger areas also makes cities safer at night; this helps reduce crime which helps the economy, and also improves quality of life for citizens. The technologies will also improve as time goes on (more efficient solar panels, cleaner production methods, better/cleaner batteries etc.), so this is likely the way of the future. Even if the fixed costs (e.g. installation) are higher, the variables costs will almost certainly be miniscule.
Well, now I'm even more certain that you're trolling, but just in case ---- I think I see the source of the misunderstanding here, evidently (at least based on your homepage) you appear to be Italian; well, in the USA they have a really fundamental principle called "freedom", embedded into the constitution and deeply into the culture. Your argument amounted to a direct statement that the government should allow neither freedoms nor human rights - this is antithetical to the American viewpoint, whereby freedom is considered a fundamental "given" (unlike your viewpoint in which you should consider yourself lucky if the government allows you to do anything like walk down the street or buy a chocolate bar or Internet).
I thought you guys were supposed to be tolerant
Um, you were espousing a view that was specifically and by definition anti-freedom, which obliterates any defence based on "tolerance", since it is fundamentally in direct opposition to the very definition of tolerance and can never be resolved with it. Hello. Tolerance means accepting other viewpoints *that are tolerant themselves* --- accepting intolerant viewpoints would make a working definition of "tolerance" impossible (and worse, you vilify the more tolerant viewpoint than yours).
In case you really aren't trolling, you're seriously confused; the *right* (yes, RIGHT) to purchase and use products (such as the Internet) must surely be one of the most fundamental rights/freedoms.
What is your evidence for "sex offenders wildly out of control"? Some stats to back up that hysterical viewpoint, please.
Of course the idea of taking away someone's fundamental rights and freedoms (not "privileges") because they committed a crime is not new - a prison sentence is exactly that, for example, as are parole conditions (again, *rights*, not *privileges*). But if an offender is that dangerous, seriously, they should just be in jail (or in a hospital if they're seriously mentally ill). Prison sentences are supposed to end.
Slashdot Mirror
People should also have freedom to tell others on a forum what (and why) they believe others should donate their cycles to ;) ... you can simply choose not to listen to them. Nobody is 'forcing' anyone, yay freedom!
Personally I say "Go Folding!!" but I'm biased, I am at risk of inheriting (and have in my family) a currently uncurable and fatal deadly protein misfolding disease which has the potential to help be cured by that kind of research --- so for me there is even a sense of urgency in the matter.
I certainly don't think SETI@Home is pointless, however, I do agree that Folding@Home should take MUCH higher priority at this point in human history, as it can have a direct impact on helping to cure diseases which affect millions of people today (including probably hundreds if not thousands of slashdotters) ... I'd rather see people first focus on that kind of research, and then later we can worry about finding alien radio signals, which if they are there now will probably still be there ten or twenty years from now.
I think you got modded unfairly here; I don't think this is flamebait, you may have a valid point - I've seen exactly this kind of thing MANY MANY times now, here in Africa and also all over the world - one or more people parade as heroes trying to do some good, manage to get lots of funding, then produce little or nothing, and move on to something else and repeat the cycle. I know people who have literally made their careers doing this.
You are technically correct, but your point has nothing to do with this LANCOR situation, since their claim is specifically about illegal use of "their" keyboard layout - nowhere does their complaint say anything about being harmed by cheap laptop dumping, nor do they represent any group of people who might have such claim.
Anyway, there is a crucially important difference between this and other forms of dumping which are actually more wrong: This is basically PRIVATE charity, it's not e.g. the US government dumping cheap computers on the 3rd world to subsidise their own industry; rather, it's private individuals using private money.
WTF? You could've at least spent three seconds Googling before posting: Nigeria has an estimated over 500 languages, many of which need special characters or [combining] diacritics (or tone markings in some casings) that can only feasibly be represented and rendered using Unicode. IMEs cater for Unicode, so this keyboard "techology" is, seemingly, nothing more than an IME that outputs certain Unicode characters or combining diacritics etc.
ASCII? Fu-gedit! That is almost as ridiculous in Nigeria as it would be expecting the Chinese to type Chinese with ASCII.
Check out Languages of Nigeria at Wikipedia. It already becomes clear even with e.g. "Oyo" on that very page that ASCII ain't gonna cut it; follow a few more links further to others e.g. Yoruba, Edo, Hausa (also note Arabic 'ajami' representation) - these are just the simple ones.
(Note I'm not the GP poster here), are you saying you live in Australia, or are from there but don't? According to your homepage, do you. Australia is not an "underdeveloped country"; it's another Western country, and as such has more in common with other Western countries like the US, UK etc. than other nations/cultures/countries. I very much doubt Aus is one of those 'childish' countries being referred to.
Are you denying that it is true though? The very existence of a "Nigerian keyboard" is only thanks to *incredible* amounts of work put in to create things like keyboards and the Unicode standard and software for easily creating IMEs and so on - countries like Nigeria have basically gotten a major free ride being able to simply directly import and use all these technologies, to massive benefit. Do you have ANY clue how much work and money went into creating Unicode alone, just one tiny component/aspect of such a system? It's mammoth, and all free to use, and yet when last did you hear one "thank you"? On the contrary, it's always just complaints about how it's not enough.
Anyway, I'm not going to convince you, let me say this instead: Dedicate your spare time for the next few years to trying to help Africa, then we'll talk again.
It's also very hard to see how this could've damaged them either way, since OLPC doesn't compete AT ALL with their keyboard - you can't exactly buy an OLPC laptop and plug it into your computer to use as a keyboard? Even if you could, it would be stupid to spend $200 on a tiny keyboard instead of $20 on a proper one. It seems pretty ridiculous to claim OLPCs might cannibalise their market, unless you can prove that somebody receiving an OLPC laptop would've bought an entire computer with their keyboard instead.
Actually, OLPCs are more likely to *grow* their market, since more children growing up who know how to use computers are eventually going to buy proper ones, and then will naturally need a Nigerian keyboard to go with that --- so actually, if OLPC used the Nigerian keyboard layout, it would encourage sales of their keyboard even more, since apart from a much larger market, all these new users would also be used to their particular layout and thus not want to change.
I suspect that sales of this keyboard are probably horribly low, so now they want to try another 'business model' (i.e. sue comparatively rich Western organisation to make a quick buck).
Just another example of the poor exploiting the rich.
Putting a bunch of Nigerian-language characters onto a keyboard doesn't qualify as an "invention"; it's exactly what's been done for hundreds of other languages around the world since before Nigerian-language characters were in the Unicode standard even (which, I might point out, that same generous West put in after working hard to create those standards in the first place and then giving them to poor countries like Nigeria for free). Perhaps the West should demand royalties from this company for using its technologies like Unicode and keyboards in the first place, haha, right.
I'm afraid this is just how things go here in Africa, and as someone else pointed out, why it'll probably remain 3rd-world indefinitely. Try give a hand to Africa, and it will demand an arm, and then try kill you for not giving the entire arm. Mod me whatever, but I've lived here all my life and seen this kind of thing over and over, facts are just facts, I wouldn't expect someone who hasn't lived here to get it.
how are you so sure?
Well, let me know when we discover the giant neural network linked to everything on the planet, sensing what's happening all over, making decisions about what it wants to do with Earth based on what's happening, and manipulating the environment to implement those decisions. Until then, I'm just going to assume that there is absolutely no such thing as Mother Nature AT ALL, no evidence for it, and just a lousy metaphor that got so out of hand that belief in it has effectively become a counterproductive pseudo-religion (honestly, too many people don't realise it's just a metaphor; I don't think it's a coincidence either that in effect all the abovementioned characteristics commonly ascribed to Mother Nature are also ascribed to God).
Stop anthropomorphizing Mother Nature! (I'd add "She hates that" if it weren't so obvious :)
Seriously though, there is no such thing as "Mother Nature".
Many of the same surveillance capabilities in China are firmly implanted in the US also, which in theory, at least from one viewpoint, puts them "in the same club"; what makes the difference - for now - is that China readily and widely abuses its powers to implement what is effectively a fascist dictatorship (where people can and do for example commonly get 'disappeared' for merely expressing views that disagree with the government), while the US abuses its powers only minimally and has NOT actually become a fascist dictatorship. So both governments have, in theory, similar *power* to perpetrate nasty stuff (which is primarily what we're measuring here), but there are still vast differences in how that power is exercised.
I'm all for not giving governments so much power in the first place, because firstly sooner or later it is inevitable that you get corrupt governments, and secondly, power begets power and power of government seldom lessens over time, so you're always heading in the wrong direction over time.
I disagree. Even though I live in a 3rd-world country I disagree. The first world gives *massively* in many many different ways to the third world, seriously.
It's just you. Seriously, calm down and take a few deep breaths; the sheer awfulness-of-it-all you're seeing everywhere doesn't really exist. It costs $200 because that's about what it costs to build such things with current tech, that's all; it's not such a bad price for what you get; licensing and commercialising the technologies is not evil - on the contrary, by increasing distribution and scale, they can make it cheaper (and there is free market competition now from AO Asus and Intel to keep the prices low) - cheap simple computers selling in large numbers WILL help the 3rd world. Last I checked they had quite a few orders from 3rd-world countries, which ARE going to benefit (basically all (non-corrupt) free-market trade is mutually beneficial - if they weren't going to benefit, even at the current price, they wouldn't have bought it). I live in a 3rd-world country. Trust me; any cheap computer is better than no computer at all (and NO, 3rd-world countries are not "just going to make their own" - the reason they're 3rd-world is that they don't (yet) have it in them to just start making things like computers).
Of course, having a women in bed with you probably affects the amount of sleep you get more than a cellphone ever could, at least that's what I've found :) ... although perhaps not so much if you've been married for a while.
... we still know extremely little (comparatively) of the details about how the brain actually works. It simply isn't possible to *know* what the effects of increased unnatural radiation might be inside the brain if we don't even know what the hell is happening inside the brain. Brains have been comparatively protected throughout our evolution too, they've seldom if ever had to deal with the particular kinds and levels and durations of EMF radiation we have now - thus it does not stand to reason that the machinery of the brain is necessarily 'tough enough' to 100% perfectly handle this stuff.
That doesn't mean that one should become hysterical and start thinking people will start dying like flies from cellphones. OBVIOUSLY that isn't happening, and NOBODY is claiming that it is. But that doesn't mean they're necessarily *perfect* and beyond even attempting to understand better.
A cursory search reveals no such study
What? A very simple Google search turns up lots of results, too many to list here even.
Cell phones have been very common for quite a long time now. If there was a correlation to cancer, there'd be a lot of dead people.
Last I checked there ARE a lot of dead people from cancer. Obviously the question is whether there are causal links in some cases, which is nearly impossible to know.
Anyway, cancer isn't the only possible effect here. There are even non-cancerous tumors, or developmental disorders - for example, we might see a few percentage increase in ADHD or dyslexia over time (in fact IIRC these are on the increase), and we'd need to do quite a bit of research to figure out if cellphones were the cause (or one of the causes) of this. Cellphones haven't even been in common use for very long; it's only for the first time in history really that we now start having a situation where many children grow up using them, so we CANNOT know the long effects yet (not you or me or anyone else on the planet can "know" - we can only conjecture based on the limited amount of scientific research that has been done).
I don't know why there are such widespread "it can't be! it can't be!" knee-jerk reactions every time someone even TRIES to scientifically investigate these things - honestly, there might be, let's just let the researchers get on with their business, the sooner we learn more the sooner we can solve the problems if there are any.
Did you know that different frequencies of electromagnetic waves have different effects on different types of materials that they strike, different levels of penetration (or reflection), different effects on different molecule types etc.? The absolute amount of energy has little to do with why such studies are interesting.
You might think there's no difference, but for one would much rather get an hour of sun at 1000 watts than an hour of X-rays at 1000 watts or an hour of (microwave-oven-frequency-radiation) at 1000 watts. Heck, even within the sun you're talking about visible light, infra-red, UV-A, UV-B etc.
Interesting; I can relate to that, but differently: It's happened to me a few times now that I've woken up with an odd 'sense' that my cellphone was ringing, and finding that it was, even though it's always on silent with vibrate off when I sleep. I don't usually wake easily. The phone is usually just less than a meter or so from my head when I sleep. The most plausible explanation to me is that my brain is noticing the changes in light levels as the screen lights up (even while I'm asleep), although it happens even during the day. Possibly the radio alarm speaker picks up slight interference which I 'hear', although I've never consciously heard that. Failing that, I wondered if the brain might somehow able to potentially learn to sense the radio interference itself - that's almost what it feels like to me.
I 100.00% grasp what you're saying - but only because I also started (and run) my own business. There are large fundamental differences between the *sacrifice* (perhaps a better word than the somewhat weak "risk"; so much more is at stake) that the business owner puts in and what a salaried employee puts in, and I don't think that any ordinary employee can ever truly appreciate or grasp what it's like without experiencing it for themselves.
But a purely Redbook Audio CD can't have rights protection on it
Perhaps that's why they're trying to kill ordinary audio CDs with this move (if you think about it, that's what it is - I for one do buy CDs legally but will never listen to them directly, it's too inconvenient, so first thing I do is rip them - now if I can't even do that legally, I'll just stop buying CDs). Who the hell listens to audio CDs directly these days? I don't know anyone who does anymore. Perhaps the RIAA wants to kill CDs and introduce a new more DRM-laden DMCA-protected distribution format that's easier for them to control - it's not like they haven't tried this before - but perhaps the timing was off; CDs are inevitably going to go the way of the dinosaur, it's only a question of when and what replaces it.
This reasoning error is basically an inductive fallacy.
Being able to more cost-effectively light larger areas also makes cities safer at night; this helps reduce crime which helps the economy, and also improves quality of life for citizens. The technologies will also improve as time goes on (more efficient solar panels, cleaner production methods, better/cleaner batteries etc.), so this is likely the way of the future. Even if the fixed costs (e.g. installation) are higher, the variables costs will almost certainly be miniscule.
Well, now I'm even more certain that you're trolling, but just in case ---- I think I see the source of the misunderstanding here, evidently (at least based on your homepage) you appear to be Italian; well, in the USA they have a really fundamental principle called "freedom", embedded into the constitution and deeply into the culture. Your argument amounted to a direct statement that the government should allow neither freedoms nor human rights - this is antithetical to the American viewpoint, whereby freedom is considered a fundamental "given" (unlike your viewpoint in which you should consider yourself lucky if the government allows you to do anything like walk down the street or buy a chocolate bar or Internet).
I thought you guys were supposed to be tolerant
Um, you were espousing a view that was specifically and by definition anti-freedom, which obliterates any defence based on "tolerance", since it is fundamentally in direct opposition to the very definition of tolerance and can never be resolved with it. Hello. Tolerance means accepting other viewpoints *that are tolerant themselves* --- accepting intolerant viewpoints would make a working definition of "tolerance" impossible (and worse, you vilify the more tolerant viewpoint than yours).
In case you really aren't trolling, you're seriously confused; the *right* (yes, RIGHT) to purchase and use products (such as the Internet) must surely be one of the most fundamental rights/freedoms.
What is your evidence for "sex offenders wildly out of control"? Some stats to back up that hysterical viewpoint, please.
Of course the idea of taking away someone's fundamental rights and freedoms (not "privileges") because they committed a crime is not new - a prison sentence is exactly that, for example, as are parole conditions (again, *rights*, not *privileges*). But if an offender is that dangerous, seriously, they should just be in jail (or in a hospital if they're seriously mentally ill). Prison sentences are supposed to end.