The issue is how significant the risk to the childs life must be before we consider the rights of the child to live greater than the right of the parents and doctors to chose. In this case, we're talking bout a virus responsible for about 70% of cervical cancers - any parent not actively getting their child a vaccine increases that childs risk of dying of cancer. By the time the child is old enough to make an informed decision, odds are good the child will already have HPV, and it will be too late. Personally I think a parent choosing not to give their child this vaccine if offered comes pretty close to abuse.
I'm sure you can. However I've yet to see anything typeset with LaTeX that didn't look like it was produced by a complete amateur... I'd love to be proven wrong, though.
You try to go to a thiefs house to take back your property, and for good measure take some of his stuff at the same time, and see what the police has to say when they arrest you for robbery.
You don't have a right to commit a crime regardless what the victim of your crime has done to you.
At least Norway is a Schengen member, and you don't need to have a passport on you to enter Norway from another Schengen member-country. If you fly in to Oslo, for example, flights from non-Schengen countries are sequestered in a special section of the airport with just a few gates behind passport control - arrivals to any other gates enter directly with no control. You are required to have a valid ID on you, which for most EEA countries gives you several alternatives to passports.
Presumably you wouldn't cache the entire internet. Bandwidth would be far more of an issue than storage. A petabyte can be stored in less than 2K drives today, and 2K drives + servers to access them via would easily fit in 20 racks with room to spare, unless you have a shitload of people hitting them. By the time you have a colony large enough to warrant a cache that size you could presumably fit it on far fewer drives.
have gone even further, opening up the drive assembly. Be prepared to lose everything when you do this, but I can tell you it is a myth that the drive sill self destruct immediately if not in a clean room.
While I haven't done this with any modern hardware, my first harddisk (a 20MB one with an XT interface) was second hand, and had a problem with the motor that caused problems getting it to spin up. I frequently opened the drive assembly, and spun the drive up with my finger (obviously I avoided touching the platter itself...). Usually it would get enough momentum after a few tries to let it spin up fully. It kept working for another 6 months or so until I finally replaced it. No problems with read/write errors at all.
A naive implementation of a log structured filesystem is as a virtual never ending sequential log overlaid on a disk that is treated as a circular buffer - when you "wrap around" deleted space may be reclaimed by doing a new write of the undeleted data from the start of the disk to the end of the log (though there are many alternative ways of handling this that may be more efective).
If you have enough space you don't need to wrap around, and thus don't need to delete anything either. Unfortunately, most of us do regularly run out of space.
every girl I've been with has stated an aesthetic preference for it (and I happen to agree)
Surprise. You live in a culture where circumcision is common, presumably. Every girl I've been that has expressed a preference thought that circumcised dicks looks weird. People at the very least get used to what is common in their culture, and often prefer that which they see as "normal".
it's easier to keep clean,
Whenever I hear this argument, it makes me want to stay ten feet away from whomever makes it, as that person clearly have problems understanding how water and soap works, and the entire concept of "washing"... Hint: It pulls back. One swift motion, and any hygiene "issues" are exactly the same as if it was circumcised. Do you also not wash behind your ears because it's hard to get to? Or clean your ass? Eww..
and apparently I have a greatly reduced risk of contracting AIDS and one or two other STIs due to reduced risk of membrane abrasion. Score!
And this time I worry on behalf of your sexual partners. The reduction in risk is so small that it makes no practical difference if you use a condom. If you're irresponsible enough to not use a condom... well then you deserve everything you'll likely get.
As we can ALREADY see, some mechanism is at least in humans reducing population growth in the parts of the population that have reached a certain level of social safety: Most developed nations are seeing sub-replacement level birth rates. In countries who have not yet reached this stage, we are seeing mass deaths and low life expectancies. And it's worth noting that this is not cultural either - immigrants moving to developed countries typically adapt to the host nations birth rate patterns within 1-3 generations.
So a simple possible answer to the Fermi paradox is that this is an inherent biological mechanism and that in any population that grows to fill its biological niche, birth rates will sooner or later drop until an equilibrium is reached, and this is likely to happen before there is significant pressure to colonize the nearby solar system or stars. While that would leave visits to other planets still reasonably likely, and perhaps even small "local" colonies, without an expanding population and diminishing resources driving prices up, pure economics would dramatically slow down the tempo of any colonization effort to what private individuals could afford and would want to try.
Look at how long Europeans had the capability to reach America before the wave of colonization started, for example. This was a set of cultures that were aggressive and expansionist. Assume the drive to start colonization gets successively less likely as the cost of doing so goes up and the immediate benefit of doing so drops. Once it takes more than a lifetime for economic value to be derived from a colony due to travel time even at light speed, the motivation for pushing for it dramatically reduces for most individuals (look at how hard it is getting people to even sacrifice spending today vs. getting a good pension until they're getting to a certain age, not to consider getting people to sacrifice now for the benefit of their children).
Even with dramatic population growth, a colony would either have to bring economic value (in the form of resources) OR cost little enough in terms of resources to initiate and transfer colonists to than leaving the people the colony would have been made up of in place for a long enough amount of time to make giving up those resources seem prudent. If improvements in how we exploit various resources keep improving, that in itself might put a significant damper on any colonization efforts.
That leaves us with possibly the odd colony here and there or the odd probe. Small colonies would face high odds of dying off, and would be unlikely to be established far away - presumably nearby stars would be targeted. Unless these colonies then enter an aggressive expansionist phase, and either had the technology to pull it off (provide resources for itself) or had the fortune of finding a location that provides abundant resources, it would take a lot of time before such a colony could produce offshoots further away. Chances are they'd grow to fill their new solar system first, and run into the same hypothetical growth reductions as we're currently seeing with developed countries on earth.
That leaves radio. Why haven't we heard radio chatter? Stephen Baxter suggested a simple solution in the novel "Space": IF there are aliens out there, we might not want to make a big fuss about our existence, and also, a civilization may simply grow past broadcasting (That book does also, btw. pose an alternative explanation for the Fermi paradox, but stating it here would be a huge spoiler - it's a good read). We might already be nearing the time where we'll "go silent", as technological advance continues. Given the number of possible stars, how short time we've been listening, and how short periods potential civilizations may broadcast, it's very possible that there just aren't enough civilizations at the right stage of development that their radio chatter happened to intersect with the time periods we are currently monitoring. We may for that
I can't stand working on large screens or using multiple screens. Good keybindings and all maximized windows combined with apps using tabs works much better for me. I switch between apps or tabs in a single app with quick key combinations, and don't have to change my focus or turn my head all the time.
But then I have always had a very clear picture of the things I work with - I can visualize the files of most of the projects in our subversion repository that I've spent time on to the point where I can picture the on screen shape of specific classes and functions for example - so I really don't need to have things on screen as long as access is fast.
Since when did communism become about concentration of power? In fact, the opposite is true - particularly Marxist ideas about communism is about the dispersal of power to larger groups, and ultimately about taking all power away from the state and devolve it to communes with near direct rule. The entire point is that centralized power is only needed if your purpose is to oppress - that's a central thesis of Marxist political theory: the state is there to let one class exercise power over another. Remove class struggle by organizing society in a way where economical power is devolved to those affected by it the same way we have democratized control over many other areas of life, and according to Marxism the foundation for the state as a concentration of power disappears.
Your argument is in any case specious as best - your exact same statement could be applied to any form of government. I could use the exact same statement to argue why the system used in the US "can't" work, for example. Concentration of power is bad, but it very obviously can co-exist with significant levels of democracy.
So exactly how would subjecting larger part of society to democratic oversight suddenly make a difference?
And where do you draw the line? In Norway, for example, medicine is socialized, and large companies are required to have a certain representation of employees on the board as voting members. If anything, Norway has a more democratic system than the US (proportional representation, for starters). How would extending the level of influence of employees and citizens on those boards reduce democracy?
Arguing about whether that would be wise, or "fair", or economically advantageous is one thing, but claiming that there is some inherent inability for such a society to be democratic on a larger scale just involves a lot of preconceived notions about how a communist society would be structured - presumably colored by countries like China, the former Soviet Union etc., that never claimed to be communist in the first place (the Soviet leaders over time claimed to be anything from a thousand years to decades away from establishing a communist system for example - they used it as a propaganda tool the same way religious fanatics use the promise of heaven)
For $400k/year I can lease 100 dual core dual CPU Woodcrest based servers with 2GB RAM and a couple of hundre GB storage each including 300 terabytes of monthly transfer. For $290K/year I'd get 100 dual core, single CPU Woodcrest based servers including about 250 terabytes of monthly transfer. That's a commercial rate without shopping around and without negotiating any sponsorships or anything.
A page on the Wikimedia foundations page indicates around 200 terabytes a month, but is marked as outdated - I have no idea how much it's grown since then. So yes, it's not cheap, but you have to wonder if they couldn't get a couple of hundred corporate sponsors to commit to $500 or so a month to pay for 1-3 servers each and get their logo as a sponsor on the pages served from that server. I know a lot of people don't want ads on Wikipedia, a single, discreet, static and easily blockable image wouldn't be very intrusive. 3TB/month of bandwidth + a server can be leased for a few hundred dollars.
One of the three judges apparently did not think they broke the law, so it's not nearly as black and white as you try to portray it. Furthermore, the majority opinion is using arguments that focus not on what they did, but about what they might do - it's certainly not clear that the majority of two judges have applied the law correctly.
Also, even if what they did violated laws on child pornography, there is the separate issue of expectation of privacy.
Regardless of that, the reason there is a system where people don't automatically get charged but one where district attorneys decide whether to press charges, is to attempt to ensure that justice is done - charges are dropped or not raised in the first place all the time when prosecuting a case isn't in the public interest.
In this case there is a law ostensibly intended to protect children, that have now instead been used to harm children. Whether or not it's the law, it's still malicious and spineless of both the prosecution and the judges not to stand up for these children instead of harming them by letting this case get this far.
That the judges who wrote the majority decision even went as far as claim that these children "could have" caused the pictures to be spread and cause harm to themselves that way is just plain disgusting - those two judges have done far more harm to these children than a few pictures would.
Uhm.. Yeah... Except that we release around 24 billion tonnes of CO2 a year into the atmosphere. Taking 1 billion tons out of it again is not only a baby step towards slowing down the increase in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.
It would certainly be a place with far less speech.
Free speech without anonymity is a joke - especially in an environment where large parts of what you say can end up being searchable and accessible to anyone "forever".
Despite 9/11 your overall odds of surviving a hijacking are still far greater if you cooperate than if you fight back - in all there have been well over a thousand hijackings worldwide, and only a minority have ended with significant numbers of deaths, and most of the deaths have been results of not cooperating with the hijackers or armed responses from the authorities. And there have already been hijackings after 9/11 that have ended peacefully.
Yes, it would be worth fighting back if you suspect the hijackers are planning a suicide action, but those kind of hijackings are still a tiny anomaly in the statistics and it's far too early to tell whether they'll ever be anything more than that.
By your logic not believing in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy is then also a belief system that has more in common with religion than non-believers in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy will be willing to admit.
I am an atheist. I simply don't believe in a god for exactly the same reasons as I don't believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, Spiderman, the Invisible Pink Unicorn an an infinite number of other unsubstantiated potential entities.
That is just as simple a "belief system" as your idea of agnosticism:
Any extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence before I will consider it valid.
Really? I manage an engineering team split almost evenly between the US and Beijing, and hiring for the US team was a real pain. Finding qualified people is extremely hard. Finding people in Beijing is tricky too, as demand there is clearly ramping up, but nowhere near the problems we've had in the US.
And why is it racist to want value for money? Why is it not racist to limit your hiring to the US?
Yes, finance was one big reason for us to look to China (our cost is about 20% of the same size team in the US), but it is also our second largest market, and so Chinese language skills is also essential to us. But given the cost difference and the problems finding skilled staff it would be suicide for us to limit our hiring to the US only, as it would put us at a significant competitive disadvantage vs. companies located elsewhere.
If you're really so ignorant that you think all the developing countries in the world are without basic infrastructure, then you really have no business talking about what they need. As for education, that's a major purpose of the OLPC.
As for "helping them", as others have pointed out, this is a take it or leave it offer of a solution they have to pay for. It's not something they'll get without making a commitment. The countries that have signed up so far have the money both to pay for the OLPC's and to pay for additional infrastructure.
Nigeria, for example, wiped out about $10 billion in foreign debt over the last few years, and had an additional $8 billion written of in return, saving them far more than the $200 million they've committed to for OLPC's so far in interest in a single year alone. That's not a country with no money. It's a country with tremendous problems, yes, and they've decided that OLPC's can be part of the solution in improving education for their children.
And we have yet another person who completely ignore that countries that are struggling with situations like the ones you describe are hardly likely to be spending the money needed to purchase OLPC's. Take a look at the list of countries that have pledged to buy them so far.
You also ignore that the OLPC has specifically been engineered to be able to be useful with as little infrastructure as possible: No electricity supply is needed, and the OLPC's can create it's own mesh network.
They "waste time" arguing on that basis because nobody has given a shit about any of the other arguments. The pollution continues, and the main polluters show little to no interest in changing.
And exactly how much influence do you think people manufacturing ethernet cards have on power supply efficiency?
You seem to assume that if these people weren't improving the power efficiency of ethernet they'd just pick some random different field. The world doesn't work like that.
Sky One, one of the most popular entertainment channels in the UK usually show a couple of hours worth every day. They have this tendency to burn through certain series over and over again at a pace of 2-4 episodes a day.
If you think the effects of caffeine are psychosomatic, you are seriously deluded. Since you're in the uk, buy some Pro Plus caffeine pills, and try slowly upping the dose (you're doing so at your own risk...). At some point you will start to have serious problems sitting still (i.e. you will feel a compulsion to "do stuff"), and will start getting a pricking feeling on the skin, and start shaking. You may . Now, at that point you've taken far more than is advisable for normal use, though far less than lethal dose... Caffeine is fairly potent.
As others have pointed out, though, you probably have developed a high tolerance. After years of drinking massive amounts of coke I'm at the point too where I can drink a couple of energy drinks right before bed and still sleep like a baby.
But it definitively has significant effects. I sometimes use caffeine before lifting weights (I alternate between using nothing, using creatine, and using caffeine), and typically a dose of 200mg or more will let me lift at least 5kg more for several parts of my routine, and will make me feel a lot less tired during the workout so I keep the intensity up much better. I've tried up to 350mg, and some research supposedly indicates that up to 650mg to 900mg is the most useful to improve exercise, but the effect on my stomach is bad enough at less than 300 that I'm not going to test that...
The downside is that at around 250mg or above, if I for whatever reason take it and get distracted so I don't get to the gym quickly, I will start shaking. A short run or a couple of sets of heavy weights will stop that pretty quickly, though.
To me it also has a very clear effect if I feel tired, but it's of course temporary and I feel more worn out when it's over, so I only take caffeine if I would benefit from a temporary improvement and know I can rest properly afterwards.
But seriously, if you have problems staying awake even with that kind of caffeine intake, cut the caffeine for a while and start exercising. Then slowly reintroduce caffeine only when you "need" the effect for a short period of time. Starting to lift weights two years ago has done far more for my energy levels than any amount of caffeine ever did. Cut sugar and carb intake too - especially if you're unfit, as insulin resistance will make you tired far more easily with those kind of foods.
Try letting a caffeine pill dissolve on your tongue. It's not a pleasant taste. I can clearly taste caffeine in several types of products, and the bitter taste of caffeine is one of the things that makes me hate most diet colas, as the sugar in regular colas is the main things masking it and very few products successfully mask the taste without ridiculous amounts of sugar.
Slashdot Mirror
The issue is how significant the risk to the childs life must be before we consider the rights of the child to live greater than the right of the parents and doctors to chose. In this case, we're talking bout a virus responsible for about 70% of cervical cancers - any parent not actively getting their child a vaccine increases that childs risk of dying of cancer. By the time the child is old enough to make an informed decision, odds are good the child will already have HPV, and it will be too late. Personally I think a parent choosing not to give their child this vaccine if offered comes pretty close to abuse.
I'm sure you can. However I've yet to see anything typeset with LaTeX that didn't look like it was produced by a complete amateur... I'd love to be proven wrong, though.
You don't have a right to commit a crime regardless what the victim of your crime has done to you.
At least Norway is a Schengen member, and you don't need to have a passport on you to enter Norway from another Schengen member-country. If you fly in to Oslo, for example, flights from non-Schengen countries are sequestered in a special section of the airport with just a few gates behind passport control - arrivals to any other gates enter directly with no control. You are required to have a valid ID on you, which for most EEA countries gives you several alternatives to passports.
Presumably you wouldn't cache the entire internet. Bandwidth would be far more of an issue than storage. A petabyte can be stored in less than 2K drives today, and 2K drives + servers to access them via would easily fit in 20 racks with room to spare, unless you have a shitload of people hitting them. By the time you have a colony large enough to warrant a cache that size you could presumably fit it on far fewer drives.
While I haven't done this with any modern hardware, my first harddisk (a 20MB one with an XT interface) was second hand, and had a problem with the motor that caused problems getting it to spin up. I frequently opened the drive assembly, and spun the drive up with my finger (obviously I avoided touching the platter itself...). Usually it would get enough momentum after a few tries to let it spin up fully. It kept working for another 6 months or so until I finally replaced it. No problems with read/write errors at all.
No. It would be a straightforward variation on a log structured filesystem
A naive implementation of a log structured filesystem is as a virtual never ending sequential log overlaid on a disk that is treated as a circular buffer - when you "wrap around" deleted space may be reclaimed by doing a new write of the undeleted data from the start of the disk to the end of the log (though there are many alternative ways of handling this that may be more efective).
If you have enough space you don't need to wrap around, and thus don't need to delete anything either. Unfortunately, most of us do regularly run out of space.
Surprise. You live in a culture where circumcision is common, presumably. Every girl I've been that has expressed a preference thought that circumcised dicks looks weird. People at the very least get used to what is common in their culture, and often prefer that which they see as "normal".
it's easier to keep clean,
Whenever I hear this argument, it makes me want to stay ten feet away from whomever makes it, as that person clearly have problems understanding how water and soap works, and the entire concept of "washing"... Hint: It pulls back. One swift motion, and any hygiene "issues" are exactly the same as if it was circumcised. Do you also not wash behind your ears because it's hard to get to? Or clean your ass? Eww..
and apparently I have a greatly reduced risk of contracting AIDS and one or two other STIs due to reduced risk of membrane abrasion. Score!
And this time I worry on behalf of your sexual partners. The reduction in risk is so small that it makes no practical difference if you use a condom. If you're irresponsible enough to not use a condom... well then you deserve everything you'll likely get.
So a simple possible answer to the Fermi paradox is that this is an inherent biological mechanism and that in any population that grows to fill its biological niche, birth rates will sooner or later drop until an equilibrium is reached, and this is likely to happen before there is significant pressure to colonize the nearby solar system or stars. While that would leave visits to other planets still reasonably likely, and perhaps even small "local" colonies, without an expanding population and diminishing resources driving prices up, pure economics would dramatically slow down the tempo of any colonization effort to what private individuals could afford and would want to try.
Look at how long Europeans had the capability to reach America before the wave of colonization started, for example. This was a set of cultures that were aggressive and expansionist. Assume the drive to start colonization gets successively less likely as the cost of doing so goes up and the immediate benefit of doing so drops. Once it takes more than a lifetime for economic value to be derived from a colony due to travel time even at light speed, the motivation for pushing for it dramatically reduces for most individuals (look at how hard it is getting people to even sacrifice spending today vs. getting a good pension until they're getting to a certain age, not to consider getting people to sacrifice now for the benefit of their children).
Even with dramatic population growth, a colony would either have to bring economic value (in the form of resources) OR cost little enough in terms of resources to initiate and transfer colonists to than leaving the people the colony would have been made up of in place for a long enough amount of time to make giving up those resources seem prudent. If improvements in how we exploit various resources keep improving, that in itself might put a significant damper on any colonization efforts.
That leaves us with possibly the odd colony here and there or the odd probe. Small colonies would face high odds of dying off, and would be unlikely to be established far away - presumably nearby stars would be targeted. Unless these colonies then enter an aggressive expansionist phase, and either had the technology to pull it off (provide resources for itself) or had the fortune of finding a location that provides abundant resources, it would take a lot of time before such a colony could produce offshoots further away. Chances are they'd grow to fill their new solar system first, and run into the same hypothetical growth reductions as we're currently seeing with developed countries on earth.
That leaves radio. Why haven't we heard radio chatter? Stephen Baxter suggested a simple solution in the novel "Space": IF there are aliens out there, we might not want to make a big fuss about our existence, and also, a civilization may simply grow past broadcasting (That book does also, btw. pose an alternative explanation for the Fermi paradox, but stating it here would be a huge spoiler - it's a good read). We might already be nearing the time where we'll "go silent", as technological advance continues. Given the number of possible stars, how short time we've been listening, and how short periods potential civilizations may broadcast, it's very possible that there just aren't enough civilizations at the right stage of development that their radio chatter happened to intersect with the time periods we are currently monitoring. We may for that
I can't stand working on large screens or using multiple screens. Good keybindings and all maximized windows combined with apps using tabs works much better for me. I switch between apps or tabs in a single app with quick key combinations, and don't have to change my focus or turn my head all the time. But then I have always had a very clear picture of the things I work with - I can visualize the files of most of the projects in our subversion repository that I've spent time on to the point where I can picture the on screen shape of specific classes and functions for example - so I really don't need to have things on screen as long as access is fast.
Your argument is in any case specious as best - your exact same statement could be applied to any form of government. I could use the exact same statement to argue why the system used in the US "can't" work, for example. Concentration of power is bad, but it very obviously can co-exist with significant levels of democracy.
So exactly how would subjecting larger part of society to democratic oversight suddenly make a difference?
And where do you draw the line? In Norway, for example, medicine is socialized, and large companies are required to have a certain representation of employees on the board as voting members. If anything, Norway has a more democratic system than the US (proportional representation, for starters). How would extending the level of influence of employees and citizens on those boards reduce democracy?
Arguing about whether that would be wise, or "fair", or economically advantageous is one thing, but claiming that there is some inherent inability for such a society to be democratic on a larger scale just involves a lot of preconceived notions about how a communist society would be structured - presumably colored by countries like China, the former Soviet Union etc., that never claimed to be communist in the first place (the Soviet leaders over time claimed to be anything from a thousand years to decades away from establishing a communist system for example - they used it as a propaganda tool the same way religious fanatics use the promise of heaven)
A page on the Wikimedia foundations page indicates around 200 terabytes a month, but is marked as outdated - I have no idea how much it's grown since then. So yes, it's not cheap, but you have to wonder if they couldn't get a couple of hundred corporate sponsors to commit to $500 or so a month to pay for 1-3 servers each and get their logo as a sponsor on the pages served from that server. I know a lot of people don't want ads on Wikipedia, a single, discreet, static and easily blockable image wouldn't be very intrusive. 3TB/month of bandwidth + a server can be leased for a few hundred dollars.
Also, even if what they did violated laws on child pornography, there is the separate issue of expectation of privacy.
Regardless of that, the reason there is a system where people don't automatically get charged but one where district attorneys decide whether to press charges, is to attempt to ensure that justice is done - charges are dropped or not raised in the first place all the time when prosecuting a case isn't in the public interest.
In this case there is a law ostensibly intended to protect children, that have now instead been used to harm children. Whether or not it's the law, it's still malicious and spineless of both the prosecution and the judges not to stand up for these children instead of harming them by letting this case get this far.
That the judges who wrote the majority decision even went as far as claim that these children "could have" caused the pictures to be spread and cause harm to themselves that way is just plain disgusting - those two judges have done far more harm to these children than a few pictures would.
Uhm.. Yeah... Except that we release around 24 billion tonnes of CO2 a year into the atmosphere. Taking 1 billion tons out of it again is not only a baby step towards slowing down the increase in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.
Free speech without anonymity is a joke - especially in an environment where large parts of what you say can end up being searchable and accessible to anyone "forever".
Yes, it would be worth fighting back if you suspect the hijackers are planning a suicide action, but those kind of hijackings are still a tiny anomaly in the statistics and it's far too early to tell whether they'll ever be anything more than that.
I am an atheist. I simply don't believe in a god for exactly the same reasons as I don't believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, Spiderman, the Invisible Pink Unicorn an an infinite number of other unsubstantiated potential entities.
That is just as simple a "belief system" as your idea of agnosticism:
Any extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence before I will consider it valid.
And why is it racist to want value for money? Why is it not racist to limit your hiring to the US?
Yes, finance was one big reason for us to look to China (our cost is about 20% of the same size team in the US), but it is also our second largest market, and so Chinese language skills is also essential to us. But given the cost difference and the problems finding skilled staff it would be suicide for us to limit our hiring to the US only, as it would put us at a significant competitive disadvantage vs. companies located elsewhere.
As for "helping them", as others have pointed out, this is a take it or leave it offer of a solution they have to pay for. It's not something they'll get without making a commitment. The countries that have signed up so far have the money both to pay for the OLPC's and to pay for additional infrastructure.
Nigeria, for example, wiped out about $10 billion in foreign debt over the last few years, and had an additional $8 billion written of in return, saving them far more than the $200 million they've committed to for OLPC's so far in interest in a single year alone. That's not a country with no money. It's a country with tremendous problems, yes, and they've decided that OLPC's can be part of the solution in improving education for their children.
You also ignore that the OLPC has specifically been engineered to be able to be useful with as little infrastructure as possible: No electricity supply is needed, and the OLPC's can create it's own mesh network.
They "waste time" arguing on that basis because nobody has given a shit about any of the other arguments. The pollution continues, and the main polluters show little to no interest in changing.
You seem to assume that if these people weren't improving the power efficiency of ethernet they'd just pick some random different field. The world doesn't work like that.
Sky One, one of the most popular entertainment channels in the UK usually show a couple of hours worth every day. They have this tendency to burn through certain series over and over again at a pace of 2-4 episodes a day.
As others have pointed out, though, you probably have developed a high tolerance. After years of drinking massive amounts of coke I'm at the point too where I can drink a couple of energy drinks right before bed and still sleep like a baby.
But it definitively has significant effects. I sometimes use caffeine before lifting weights (I alternate between using nothing, using creatine, and using caffeine), and typically a dose of 200mg or more will let me lift at least 5kg more for several parts of my routine, and will make me feel a lot less tired during the workout so I keep the intensity up much better. I've tried up to 350mg, and some research supposedly indicates that up to 650mg to 900mg is the most useful to improve exercise, but the effect on my stomach is bad enough at less than 300 that I'm not going to test that...
The downside is that at around 250mg or above, if I for whatever reason take it and get distracted so I don't get to the gym quickly, I will start shaking. A short run or a couple of sets of heavy weights will stop that pretty quickly, though.
To me it also has a very clear effect if I feel tired, but it's of course temporary and I feel more worn out when it's over, so I only take caffeine if I would benefit from a temporary improvement and know I can rest properly afterwards.
But seriously, if you have problems staying awake even with that kind of caffeine intake, cut the caffeine for a while and start exercising. Then slowly reintroduce caffeine only when you "need" the effect for a short period of time. Starting to lift weights two years ago has done far more for my energy levels than any amount of caffeine ever did. Cut sugar and carb intake too - especially if you're unfit, as insulin resistance will make you tired far more easily with those kind of foods.
Try letting a caffeine pill dissolve on your tongue. It's not a pleasant taste. I can clearly taste caffeine in several types of products, and the bitter taste of caffeine is one of the things that makes me hate most diet colas, as the sugar in regular colas is the main things masking it and very few products successfully mask the taste without ridiculous amounts of sugar.