The fact that the OLPCs are not offered in US toy stores even before pushing them abroad makes me suspect that they are seriously underpowered machines
The XO is not a toy, it's an educational tool. I don't see math textbooks in U.S. toy stores.
Is you Compaq designed to take all sorts of abuse, and be able to withstand water and dust and such?
The durability and the low power consumption make this very interesting to me. If I can plug my phone into it via a USB port it could be a great connectivity solution while camping. (Festival-type campground camping in rural but not backwoods areas, where I can still get a cell signal, and be reachable in case of a work emergency. Backwoods camping is a different beast, if I'm going to the woods I am gone and don't expect to reach me.)
The thing to understand is that skepticism / atheism are cults just like Christianity, Islam, Wicca and all the rest.
There are cults built around skepticism, atheism, Christianity, Islam, Wicca, and pretty much anything else; that doesn't necessarily mean that all groups centered around them are cults.
As the Washington Post admitted (though only deep into an article whose headline and lead tells how recounts would have favored Bush):
Under several scenarios examined by the consortium, and using a standard in which two of the three reviewers agreed on the markings on each ballot, Gore emerged with more votes than Bush.
The overvotes that could have provided the margin for Gore were on ballots where voters tried to be extra-clear in their choice and ended up nullifying the vote. They filled in the oval next to a candidate and then filled in the oval for "write-in" and wrote the same candidate's name again.
...
The narrowest margin, according to the study, came under a scenario in which at least one corner of a chad was detached from punch-card ballots -- the prevailing standard across the state of Florida at the time -- or any mark on the optical scan ballots showing clear voter intent. In that case, the study showed Gore with 60 votes more than Bush.
Gore's margin grows under three other scenarios. Under the least-restrictive standard for interpreting voter intent, which counted all dimpled chads and any discernible optical mark (which in the case of optical ballots Florida's new election law now requires to be counted as votes), Gore had 107 more votes.
Gore's margin rose to 115 votes in the study under a tighter standard, calling for chads to be fully punched and a more restrictive interpretation of what constitutes a valid mark on optical scan ballots.
But this is one case where disagreements among the reviewers affected the outcome. Gore won under this scenario when two of the reviewers agree on the markings. Under a standard in which all three were required to agree, Bush won by 219 votes.
Gore's largest margin in a statewide recount involving all ballots comes under a scenario that sought to recreate the standards established by each of the counties in their recounts. In that case, Gore emerged with 171 more votes than Bush.
That's not even taking into account the inclusion of illegitimate absentee ballots that favored Bush, or the illegal disenfranchisement of likely Gore voters, or the poorly-designed and illegal "butterfly ballots" in Palm Beach.
It also appears that, emboldened by their success in Florida in 2000, the Bush camp went on to conduct massive vote fraud in Ohio in 2004, quite possibly enough to steal the election there.
uh oh, forgot to put on the flame retardant overcoat before I said that
Not meant as a flame. The corporate mainstream media did in fact report as if the recount favored Bush, by focusing on what recounts were demanded under Gore's strategy rather than the question of what ballots were actually cast.
But it is clear that in Florida in 2000, more voters went to the polls intending to vote for Gore; despite intimidation and illegal purges of the voter rolls, more voters got to the voting booth intending to vote for Gore; and despite bad balloting technology and practices (which disproportionately affected poor neighborhoods, making a mockery of "equal protection"), more voters voted for Gore than voted for Bush.
But the GOP played better politics than the spineless, gonad-less, soulless thing that is all that remains of the Democratic Party. And so came the point the historians will mark as the end of the
As a software engineer, my question is why electric guitars even *need* to be in tune? Just pump out whatever frequency that string is *supposed* to play to the amp.
An electric guitar is not a digital, nor even an electonically-controlled, instrument. There are guitar synths, and electonically-controlled things like the Line6 Variax. But those aren't really "electric guitars".
A solid-body electric guitar has magnetic coil transducers that generate an electrical signal as the metal strings vibrate in a magnetic field. That's pretty much it: no chips, not even transistors. It's a simple tool, rather in line with the Unix philosophy.
You can then take that signal and pipe through whatever processing you want - off board, in your stomp boxes or rack effect units. But don't mess with the guitar, any more than you'd mess with grep by trying to make it include awk.
This, though, is a mechanical thing, that just automates what the guitarist does when he looks at a tuner and frobs the tuning knobs until the needle hits center or the green light lights or whatever. It's a just a convenience, not a true alteration of function.
Doesn't everyone here already know all about Gimp?
Sayeth TFA, "And even if you already use image editing software, the book is well worth a read -- I have been using GIMP for several years and still learned a great deal."
I'm sure most/.'ers know GIMP, and can use it for simple operations like cropping a photo or adjusting its brightness. That doesn't mean we "know all about" this complex application.
I've been messing around with photography more lately (mostly since I've been travelling more, and might pick up a copy of this book.
You seem to think laws need to be somehow morally grounded. That is not the essence of laws.
It's often how laws get made. "We have a moral imperative to protect the children! Only pedophiles and terrorists use encryption!"
Fortunately, here in the U.S. (chuckle) we have a Constitution (ha ha) that strictly limits government powers (ho ho ho) and guarantees the right to not testify against one's self (chortle guffaw ROTFLMA).
Do you think that people should stop buying from Coke, Microsoft, Apple, GM, Ford, yada-yada-yada because they aren't happy with the occupation in Iraq??
Yes, people in other countries should stop buying American products, since this would influence Coke, Microsoft, etc. to get the politicians in their pockets to end the war. America is, de facto, ruled by corporations; you must influence the corporations to influence the nation. (Or, we could have massive economic and political reform that returns control to the citizens. Good luck with that.)
More so, we should stop buying from companies that use prison labor,whether in China or in the U.S..
Lenovo probably has much less influence on the Chinese government than Microsoft has on the U.S. government, so the first point probably applies much less to Chinese companies. I don't know about Lenovo's involvement with prison labor.
No, it's not irrelevant. The leaders we were at war with killed themeselves rather than surrender sovereignty; the new government, de facto, had no sovereignty to surrender. These fact support the point that surrendering is a very difficult choice for leaders to make.
As to who was gonna get nuked, take it up with FDR.
Um, yes. Isn't that sort of the point of this dialog? I can't take it up with him directly, him being dead and all, but I can take it up with our historical interpretation of him.
He finished what Lincoln started.
??? Piece was president when Perry steamed into Tokyo Bay; the Harris Treaty was signed under the Buchanan administration. What did Lincoln start?
And I'd say the internment camps were a clear indication he didn't like Japanese people much.
Yes. And not just him. The "greatest generation" were by and large a racist bunch.
Hitler didn't surrender Germany, and in fact denounced Himmler when Himmler tried to start peace negotiations. By the time Dönitz took over after Hitler and Goebbels offed themselves, the war was de facto over, with the loss of Berlin.
If nukes weren't needed to stop Hitler, they weren't needed to stop Japan either. In fact the decision that the first bombs would fall on Japan rather than Germany was made over a year before the massacre at Hiroshima.
GPL protects the freedom of the code, not the freedom of the developer.
Code doesn't have freedom. People do. The GPL protects the freedoms of people to use, share, and modify software.
If you want developer freedom, use the BSD license or some such.
The ability to create proprietary code based on free software - to say, "I got to use X freely to make my program Y, but if you try to use Y freely I will use government force to stop you!" - is not freedom. Freedom requires equality; any relationship in which one party will not allow others to do what they do, is not free.
If they Japanese were ready to surrender, why didn't they after Hiroshima?
They wanted to negoiate for the safety of the Emperor and for the continuation of the Imperial system. And there were differences within the highest ranks of command - even leading to an abortive coup attempt.
(One of the great ironies of the whole thing being, that the restoration of the Emperor to power nearly a century before had been a direct result of demands of the U.S. that Japan open relationships. What, stupid and exploitive foreign policy coming back to bite us in the ass? Unheard of...)
I hear it's not that hard.
What, a nation unconditionally surrendering its sovereignty is "not that hard"?
If you don't accept that there are ads, and you don't want to pay a subscription, who do you expect to pay this for you?
Way back when, in the days before the September That Never Ended, we had a peer-to-peer discussion system called USENET. You could buy a feed, but the cost - split among the participants - was low enough that many schools and businesses provided access to students and employees for free.
Anyway. Who do you think pays for advertising? Whether it's Coca-Cola bringing you the season premier of Heroes tonight, or IBM bringing you this/. page, the costs get passed on to you when you buy a six-pack or a new server. (And then there's the psychological cost of living in a sea of mind-control messages...)
That's because the days of self-installs are generally long over with.
Really? What's up with that?
It was ten years ago when I put up my Dish Network dish, and it was pretty easy (I have an unobstructed southern view)...has installation gotten harder somehow, or are they not selling systems direct to users anymore?
Capitalists attempted to steal the term in the 1950s, but capitalism requires a huge amount of state intervention and control of the people - land and resource deeds, corporate charters, copyrights, patents, everything that creates and supports the control of economic resources by a minority owning class. A system based on the exchange of labor - i.e., socialism - can do with much less intervention, approaching zero as non-coercive social forms or organization grow.
You'll note that right-wingers who like to identify as "libertarian" and talk about "smaller government", never mean reducing any of these state powers that funnel control of weath into the hands of a few. In fact most believe that turning land, natural resources, and even ideas into "property", and protecting the control of that "property" by the owning class, is the prime function of the state. Their idea of "smaller government" is ripping the governors off the engine of the state that enables capitalism, not shrinking the engine.
She's lucky that the people who are trained to handle live firearms in public places are responsible people?
Considering the low entry requirements and low level of training? Yes, she is lucky.
I was kind of hoping there was more to their training than, "Here's a gun. Luck will guide you."
Not much. Police only get a couple hundred hours of training, and most of that is in procedure, investigations, etcetera. The average cop is not at all well trained to deal with any sort of crisis or potentially violent situation
I think that even to people involved with electronics it could look like something threatening.
Not in a million years.
Anyone who's played with electronics is going to look at that and assume it to be a blinkenlights toy.
Apparently, though, we've reached the level of paranoia where anything electronic that dodn' come from Best Buy must be presumed a bomb.
I think the police did their job and this Star Simpson person was pretty stupid to try that. Talk about no common sense.
Simpson wasn't "trying" anything. She was picking up a friend at the airport, wearing what was to her (an MIT geek) a fairly normal bit of clothing. The lack of common sense was once again on the part of the cops.
The nooses were hung on Sept 1. The fight occurred on Dec 4th. That's three months. The events are definitely related.
The events are only related if the guy who got beat down was involved in hanging the nooses, and I'm unaware of any allegations that he did. Collective guilt doesn't wash; something somebody else did three months ago is no excuse for a violent attack on someone today.
The guys hanging the nooses were assholes, and their behavior should not be tolerated by the school. Three day in-school suspension, with no public statement by the school, may well have been much too light. But calling trying to get the FBI involved, is amazing overreaction.
A six-on-one aggravated assault goes far beyond mere assholery; it is a serious crime, and if convicted those involved should be dealt with accordingly. It's wrong to portray the assailants in this case as some sort of innocents.
However, the charge of "attempted murder" is clearly trumped up. In Mychal Bell's case, time served plus probation is probably plenty.
as well as the charge of shotgun theft when defending themselves against someone pointing a shotgun them (another totally unrelated incident, I'm sure).
Again, was the victim of this beating involved in that incident? Then yes, it is a totally unrelated incident.
Grabbing a shotgun from someone threatening you is a justified act of self-defense, regardless of how much melanin anyone involved has in their skin, or what sort of discrimination they or they ancestors have undergone.
A six-on-one beatdown is a serious crime of violence, regardless of how much melanin anyone involved has in their skin, or what sort of discrimination they or they ancestors have undergone.
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The XO is not a toy, it's an educational tool. I don't see math textbooks in U.S. toy stores.
The durability and the low power consumption make this very interesting to me. If I can plug my phone into it via a USB port it could be a great connectivity solution while camping. (Festival-type campground camping in rural but not backwoods areas, where I can still get a cell signal, and be reachable in case of a work emergency. Backwoods camping is a different beast, if I'm going to the woods I am gone and don't expect to reach me.)
What, do you seriously think that no one in the West was questioning religious orthodoxy before the twentieth century?
There are cults built around skepticism, atheism, Christianity, Islam, Wicca, and pretty much anything else; that doesn't necessarily mean that all groups centered around them are cults.
No.
Data from the NORC recount shows that under the legal standard in force at the time, the "intent of the voter", more ballots were cast for Gore than for Bush.
As the Washington Post admitted (though only deep into an article whose headline and lead tells how recounts would have favored Bush):
That's not even taking into account the inclusion of illegitimate absentee ballots that favored Bush, or the illegal disenfranchisement of likely Gore voters, or the poorly-designed and illegal "butterfly ballots" in Palm Beach.
It also appears that, emboldened by their success in Florida in 2000, the Bush camp went on to conduct massive vote fraud in Ohio in 2004, quite possibly enough to steal the election there.
Not meant as a flame. The corporate mainstream media did in fact report as if the recount favored Bush, by focusing on what recounts were demanded under Gore's strategy rather than the question of what ballots were actually cast.
But it is clear that in Florida in 2000, more voters went to the polls intending to vote for Gore; despite intimidation and illegal purges of the voter rolls, more voters got to the voting booth intending to vote for Gore; and despite bad balloting technology and practices (which disproportionately affected poor neighborhoods, making a mockery of "equal protection"), more voters voted for Gore than voted for Bush.
But the GOP played better politics than the spineless, gonad-less, soulless thing that is all that remains of the Democratic Party. And so came the point the historians will mark as the end of the
An electric guitar is not a digital, nor even an electonically-controlled, instrument. There are guitar synths, and electonically-controlled things like the Line6 Variax. But those aren't really "electric guitars".
A solid-body electric guitar has magnetic coil transducers that generate an electrical signal as the metal strings vibrate in a magnetic field. That's pretty much it: no chips, not even transistors. It's a simple tool, rather in line with the Unix philosophy.
You can then take that signal and pipe through whatever processing you want - off board, in your stomp boxes or rack effect units. But don't mess with the guitar, any more than you'd mess with grep by trying to make it include awk.
This, though, is a mechanical thing, that just automates what the guitarist does when he looks at a tuner and frobs the tuning knobs until the needle hits center or the green light lights or whatever. It's a just a convenience, not a true alteration of function.
Ah! Over my head, a lightbulb just lit. Of it, that way I never before thought. Arigato gozaimasu.
Sayeth TFA, "And even if you already use image editing software, the book is well worth a read -- I have been using GIMP for several years and still learned a great deal."
I'm sure most /.'ers know GIMP, and can use it for simple operations like cropping a photo or adjusting its brightness. That doesn't mean we "know all about" this complex application.
I've been messing around with photography more lately (mostly since I've been travelling more, and might pick up a copy of this book.
It's often how laws get made. "We have a moral imperative to protect the children! Only pedophiles and terrorists use encryption!"
Fortunately, here in the U.S. (chuckle) we have a Constitution (ha ha) that strictly limits government powers (ho ho ho) and guarantees the right to not testify against one's self (chortle guffaw ROTFLMA).
Yes, people in other countries should stop buying American products, since this would influence Coke, Microsoft, etc. to get the politicians in their pockets to end the war. America is, de facto, ruled by corporations; you must influence the corporations to influence the nation. (Or, we could have massive economic and political reform that returns control to the citizens. Good luck with that.)
More so, we should stop buying from companies that use prison labor,whether in China or in the U.S..
Lenovo probably has much less influence on the Chinese government than Microsoft has on the U.S. government, so the first point probably applies much less to Chinese companies. I don't know about Lenovo's involvement with prison labor.
No, it's not irrelevant. The leaders we were at war with killed themeselves rather than surrender sovereignty; the new government, de facto, had no sovereignty to surrender. These fact support the point that surrendering is a very difficult choice for leaders to make.
Um, yes. Isn't that sort of the point of this dialog? I can't take it up with him directly, him being dead and all, but I can take it up with our historical interpretation of him.
??? Piece was president when Perry steamed into Tokyo Bay; the Harris Treaty was signed under the Buchanan administration. What did Lincoln start?
Yes. And not just him. The "greatest generation" were by and large a racist bunch.
Hitler didn't surrender Germany, and in fact denounced Himmler when Himmler tried to start peace negotiations. By the time Dönitz took over after Hitler and Goebbels offed themselves, the war was de facto over, with the loss of Berlin.
If nukes weren't needed to stop Hitler, they weren't needed to stop Japan either. In fact the decision that the first bombs would fall on Japan rather than Germany was made over a year before the massacre at Hiroshima.
Code doesn't have freedom. People do. The GPL protects the freedoms of people to use, share, and modify software.
The ability to create proprietary code based on free software - to say, "I got to use X freely to make my program Y, but if you try to use Y freely I will use government force to stop you!" - is not freedom. Freedom requires equality; any relationship in which one party will not allow others to do what they do, is not free.
They wanted to negoiate for the safety of the Emperor and for the continuation of the Imperial system. And there were differences within the highest ranks of command - even leading to an abortive coup attempt.
(One of the great ironies of the whole thing being, that the restoration of the Emperor to power nearly a century before had been a direct result of demands of the U.S. that Japan open relationships. What, stupid and exploitive foreign policy coming back to bite us in the ass? Unheard of...)
What, a nation unconditionally surrendering its sovereignty is "not that hard"?
Every time I use a condom, I'm doing something about it.
Way back when, in the days before the September That Never Ended, we had a peer-to-peer discussion system called USENET. You could buy a feed, but the cost - split among the participants - was low enough that many schools and businesses provided access to students and employees for free.
What killed USENET? Advertising.
Anyway. Who do you think pays for advertising? Whether it's Coca-Cola bringing you the season premier of Heroes tonight, or IBM bringing you this /. page, the costs get passed on to you when you buy a six-pack or a new server. (And then there's the psychological cost of living in a sea of mind-control messages...)
Really? What's up with that?
It was ten years ago when I put up my Dish Network dish, and it was pretty easy (I have an unobstructed southern view)...has installation gotten harder somehow, or are they not selling systems direct to users anymore?
Actually TRUE libertarians are libertarian socialists, a.k.a. anarchists.
Capitalists attempted to steal the term in the 1950s, but capitalism requires a huge amount of state intervention and control of the people - land and resource deeds, corporate charters, copyrights, patents, everything that creates and supports the control of economic resources by a minority owning class. A system based on the exchange of labor - i.e., socialism - can do with much less intervention, approaching zero as non-coercive social forms or organization grow.
You'll note that right-wingers who like to identify as "libertarian" and talk about "smaller government", never mean reducing any of these state powers that funnel control of weath into the hands of a few. In fact most believe that turning land, natural resources, and even ideas into "property", and protecting the control of that "property" by the owning class, is the prime function of the state. Their idea of "smaller government" is ripping the governors off the engine of the state that enables capitalism, not shrinking the engine.
It looks like a homemade version of a raver's blinking lights toy.
If your first thought is "bomb", if you're in such a constant state of fear, then the terrorists have won.
I am so making that into a t-shirt...
Considering the low entry requirements and low level of training? Yes, she is lucky.
Not much. Police only get a couple hundred hours of training, and most of that is in procedure, investigations, etcetera. The average cop is not at all well trained to deal with any sort of crisis or potentially violent situation
It did not take two nuclear bombs - or any nuclear bombs - to get the Japanese to surrender. They were already beginning negotiations.
It took two bombs to scare the Soviets, and to justify the expense of the Manhattan Project to the American people.
No. It doesn't. It looks like a toy that goes blink.
A bomb would have to have some sort of, you know, stuff that goes boom. Not just lights that go blink.
Not in a million years.
Anyone who's played with electronics is going to look at that and assume it to be a blinkenlights toy.
Apparently, though, we've reached the level of paranoia where anything electronic that dodn' come from Best Buy must be presumed a bomb.
Simpson wasn't "trying" anything. She was picking up a friend at the airport, wearing what was to her (an MIT geek) a fairly normal bit of clothing. The lack of common sense was once again on the part of the cops.
The events are only related if the guy who got beat down was involved in hanging the nooses, and I'm unaware of any allegations that he did. Collective guilt doesn't wash; something somebody else did three months ago is no excuse for a violent attack on someone today.
None of the statements taken by the DA said that the assault was caused by the nooses. It bears many hallmarks of an after-the-fact justification.
The guys hanging the nooses were assholes, and their behavior should not be tolerated by the school. Three day in-school suspension, with no public statement by the school, may well have been much too light. But calling trying to get the FBI involved, is amazing overreaction.
A six-on-one aggravated assault goes far beyond mere assholery; it is a serious crime, and if convicted those involved should be dealt with accordingly. It's wrong to portray the assailants in this case as some sort of innocents.
However, the charge of "attempted murder" is clearly trumped up. In Mychal Bell's case, time served plus probation is probably plenty.
Again, was the victim of this beating involved in that incident? Then yes, it is a totally unrelated incident.
Grabbing a shotgun from someone threatening you is a justified act of self-defense, regardless of how much melanin anyone involved has in their skin, or what sort of discrimination they or they ancestors have undergone.
A six-on-one beatdown is a serious crime of violence, regardless of how much melanin anyone involved has in their skin, or what sort of discrimination they or they ancestors have undergone.