Ideally, the government should only do four things, A) Protect citizens from foreign invasion B) Protect citizens from fraud C) Printing a stable currency *preferably backed by something other than "the full faith of the government"* and D) Protecting citizens from harm from other citizens.
My apologies for being blunt, but you are completely mistaken, for one simple reason: your ideal government is not ideal for others, such as those who support the entirety of the UDHR (which includes stuff like access to medical care, and had it been written in the light of current technology, would probably have a clause relating to the freedom to access the web).
In my opinion - and it is of course only an opinion - the only way to get close to some kind of utopia politically is a system which recognises all political views as valid. The best way to do that is to decentralize government as much as possible. That may mean "more" government in a way, but it is done at a far more local level - your street, neighbourhood, or town, rather than state/federal.
I disagree that A) a national government should protect citizens from foreign invasion, but then I don't like the idea of sovereignty of nations. Rather, I would prefer to see multiple blocs have sufficient military power but also sufficient political power for negotiation within a UN-type construction to be able to take action on people such as Saddam Hussein and Robert Mugabe. To rephrase: Invading Iraq and taking control would have been much easier if done with the full support of the UN.
There is little difference between your B) and D), unless you meant physical harm. But the best way to prevent crimes with victims is to educate, in my opinion: both the victim (how not to get stung), but also the criminal (be that a rogue stock trader or a drug addict fencing your car radio). Zero tolerance is an awful policy to have at the million+ people level, but with total decentralization, it is not a problem.
For example, if public transport is available then it is realistically possible to have residential areas be alcohol-free (in addition to whatever other drugs you want to decriminalize). Similarly, it would allow larger areas (1M+ cities/states) to officially be against such things as gay marriage and abortion, yet guarantee the rights of minorities all the same. My thinking here is not that there be ghettos for gays, but rather that those less tolerant do have clear options where their local environment is as they prefer.
As to C) I'm all for backing currencies with something tangible, but despite the fact that I would prefer to live in a high-quality commune (kibutz/5-star hotel cross), I simply don't understand the obsession with gold. The true value of man's endeavours is the "average labour hour", but that's rather hard to make a currency out of. Instead, I'd propose that every level of government is run similarly to a company or charity, and that currency should be based on a basket mutual fund. This might have 5-10% precious and useful metals, but also similar percentages of land and real estate, futures on essential foods, etc.
My ideal government would have people like Ron Paul continuing in their day jobs, but spending a day per week, plus a week per quarter, plus perhaps a month per year as volunteers (paid standard wage plus costs). A position such as "president" might be full time, with limitations (even 8 years is too much!), but national/state senate/representatives would have only roughly 1/4 FTU "working" on politics.
I do agree that it should not be the top level government to implement this, at all. They are OK for national defence and serious crime, as well as co-ordination and describing ideals, but most other things should be handled at (much) lower levels. For example, if it decided that broadband is equivalent to a basic right, then the federal government should not try to implement it by itself, but rather provide a forum for states (which in turn provide forums for the next level
How that can end badly? Especially since a politician has a comprehensive economic plan that will create millions of good local jobs, ensure our nation's energy security, get the government's budget and spending practices in order, and bring relief to local consumers.
- BASIC (or Pascal,if you're feeling sadistic. The logical steps/sequence in programming apply across all programming languages.)
I struggle with you definition of sadism.
As you can probably guess by my ID here, I have used Pascal extensively. The first language I learned though, was BASIC. It wasn't very good for writing programs longer than 3276 lines though.
I'll rephrase. It was designed as a simple teaching language. It is great for 20 line programs. It gets very shitty beyond that.
I'm not going to toot the horn of Pascal either. It is better than C and Java as a language to learn first, but only marginally so.
Logo and Forth. for starters. They are both easy to implement on very small computers.
And after that, javascript before basic. That would be sufficient base knowledge for simple PHP/etc.
I work for a city, and the Librarian most emphatically does not have the right to give away, loan, or otherwise remove any city property. That is a crime.
The reason that free software has poor usability is that free software is a subset of software, which is noted for poor usability.
The vast majority of software is written by and used by a single person, and would probably be hard to use for anybody else. Sometimes these projects get to be free.
Most of the remainder have a limited target, whether it is an in-house project or free. Some of these are easily usable, but the majority of companies will prefer more features to usability.
The tiny fraction of "big software" which has serious market penetration comes in three main categories: operating systems, utilities with a free version, and games. Operating systems typically have incredibly poor usability; really successful games almost all have decent usability.
The only real difference between free and commercial software is that the makers of the latter have a better chance of making a living off it.
"in STV, it's very hard to predict what impact your vote will actually have."
And this is worse than having to pick between the lesser of two evils exactly how?
STV will be imperfect if it is only used once every X years to decide a single position or issue, as is any other system. But it has the strength that it allows you to prioritise your candidates; with luck you will get your first (or perhaps second) choice, and it is to be hoped that widely unpopular candidates don't sneak in because the only other candidate is considered by many other voters to be "the lesser of two evils".
As an occasional Dutch-to-English translator, I've got to disagree with you. I grew up bilingual but my written Dutch isn't very good, yet when I went skiing some time before I was 10, I recall being able to read German comics (Tintin=Kuifje, so with more than kiddy dialogue) with no difficulty at all. Granted there were pictures to help, but the only question I had was why there was a B in their word for street!
English is actually closer to Frisian from a historical perspective, whilst Dutch is very similar to Low German as spoken across northern Germany and even into Poland. Of course English has the additional influence of Norman French added to the Angle and Saxon dialects of 1000 years ago, whilst Dutch has been influenced much later (from the Burgundians on, in Southern NL, much of northern NL was presumably not considered prime land until about the Dutch Golden Age, and Zeeland and various polders such as Schiphol were still very very wet. That and you had waterlinies).
Anyway, the vocabulary of Dutch is about halfway between those of it's neighbours to either side, but the grammar is essentially "German Lite". Pronunciation and intonation are also more like German than English.
A German will be able to say "misschien is uw Schevenginse scheermesje niet scherp genoeg" before a Dutchman manages a perfect "dough faced plough boy who coughed and laughed his way through Scarbrough", tho'!
Probably because all these stories call this One Laptop Per Child, and only a few of them mention a $100 target cost.
Considering what a 1GB storage laptop would have cost 10 years ago, let alone 20, I think we can safely say that the COST target will be reached relatively soon - within 2-5 years.
As for the "per child" target, it may take a bit longer. Maybe 20-50. Consider the ever-increasing changes since 1945, less than a lifetime ago. If Nigeria has a million OLPCs next year, it will have close to a million times the processing power of Bletchley Park in WWII.
You must be about 13 years old then. I seem to recall that back in the early 90s the USD:GBP exchange rate was about 2:1. According to http://eh.net/hmit/exchangerates/pound.php, the last time you could buy more than two dollars for a pound was 1975. Maybe try waiting until the viagra has worn out before spouting off drivel.
Cathode = Very high voltage at the back of your computer Computer = Box with a transformer at the back of it
High voltage = Van der Graaf generator = not necessarily dangerous
Monitor = at least a foot from your face
Cell phone = one inch from your brain, recent development = health & safety concerns we have now = no-one would ever go for it
CRT = a frikken TV with laser beams!
Seriously, the electro-magnetic spectrum needs to be treated with respect, but CRTs (invented in 1897) are just one application. Cell phones are another, and there are the odd crazies who think they are bad. Anything to excess is bad, but don't blame it on the electrons, photons or beta particle emissions without taking the complete picture.
They will be constructed in Taiwan. Perhaps in 10 years time the Nigerian ones will be constructed in Nigeria. The OS and keyboard will be localised. This is the modern, non-religious equivalent of missionaries. Missionaries have been treated badly often enough not to be nice, but have also chosen their battles - and OLPC is at the request of the receiving country, rather than air-dropped into hostile zones.
The terrorists want to blow up ALL OF LONDON!!! so they take 50 or so cell-phones, download custom ringtones made of people yelling at each other and then tape them up near the cameras in various innocuous locations around town.
Yes, this new invention will be useless until they develop some means of transmitting moving images from these so-called 'cameras' to Scotland Yard!!!
"The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak"
Or as translated into Russian, "The vodka is strong but the meat is rotten"
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
>The age of simple software is once again coming to a close.
What makes you think that AJAX won't be made simple?
For example, how hard is it going to be to detect and download new posts in forums (such as/.) dynamically, if you have a thread open in a tab? Not much harder than automating hitting refresh, with some XML and XSLT.
And it won't be needed for everything, by any means. Just a certain class of web apps which need to be able to run on multiple browsers (and also on dial-up/cell phones).
The FA states that this method is meant to deflect small asteroids. Not huge ones. It states it is meant to take decades, yet people post that the engines/fuel won't last that long.
The method is pretty obvious: put the big frozen fuel tank in a 'synchronous' orbit, and drag the (medium-sized, identified) asteroid up every time the tank gets pulled too close, or continuously, very slowly. Apparently the calculations may work; it is beneficial for the tank to be bulky, after all.
The whole point is that the risk is not from the massive, known asteroids, with known trajectories, nor the tiny ones too small to be a danger. It is from the small-medium ones which may be detected well in advance, i.e. on a previous incoming close visit, but which do need deflecting.
The science fiction version of this is a space shield with a number of these devices somehow ready to tag on to the orbit of an asteroid. And catching the orbit (in time) is the hardest part.
>That's why I said many low impact hits. Did you not even read my post?
Did you not even read the article?
>>>Despite the urge to give the asteroid a hardy tug, the key to moving an asteroid with gravity is to be gentle. An asteroid is likely to be loosely packed material, so tugging on it too hard could break it into unmanageable pieces.
Slashdot Mirror
and the "full-featured" version costs money and uses a dongle or something.
Yes, a 1048576-node supercomputer, 1 billion wire taps, and root access to the internet.
Ideally, the government should only do four things, A) Protect citizens from foreign invasion B) Protect citizens from fraud C) Printing a stable currency *preferably backed by something other than "the full faith of the government"* and D) Protecting citizens from harm from other citizens.
My apologies for being blunt, but you are completely mistaken, for one simple reason: your ideal government is not ideal for others, such as those who support the entirety of the UDHR (which includes stuff like access to medical care, and had it been written in the light of current technology, would probably have a clause relating to the freedom to access the web).
In my opinion - and it is of course only an opinion - the only way to get close to some kind of utopia politically is a system which recognises all political views as valid. The best way to do that is to decentralize government as much as possible. That may mean "more" government in a way, but it is done at a far more local level - your street, neighbourhood, or town, rather than state/federal.
I disagree that A) a national government should protect citizens from foreign invasion, but then I don't like the idea of sovereignty of nations. Rather, I would prefer to see multiple blocs have sufficient military power but also sufficient political power for negotiation within a UN-type construction to be able to take action on people such as Saddam Hussein and Robert Mugabe. To rephrase: Invading Iraq and taking control would have been much easier if done with the full support of the UN.
There is little difference between your B) and D), unless you meant physical harm. But the best way to prevent crimes with victims is to educate, in my opinion: both the victim (how not to get stung), but also the criminal (be that a rogue stock trader or a drug addict fencing your car radio). Zero tolerance is an awful policy to have at the million+ people level, but with total decentralization, it is not a problem.
For example, if public transport is available then it is realistically possible to have residential areas be alcohol-free (in addition to whatever other drugs you want to decriminalize). Similarly, it would allow larger areas (1M+ cities/states) to officially be against such things as gay marriage and abortion, yet guarantee the rights of minorities all the same. My thinking here is not that there be ghettos for gays, but rather that those less tolerant do have clear options where their local environment is as they prefer.
As to C) I'm all for backing currencies with something tangible, but despite the fact that I would prefer to live in a high-quality commune (kibutz/5-star hotel cross), I simply don't understand the obsession with gold. The true value of man's endeavours is the "average labour hour", but that's rather hard to make a currency out of. Instead, I'd propose that every level of government is run similarly to a company or charity, and that currency should be based on a basket mutual fund. This might have 5-10% precious and useful metals, but also similar percentages of land and real estate, futures on essential foods, etc.
My ideal government would have people like Ron Paul continuing in their day jobs, but spending a day per week, plus a week per quarter, plus perhaps a month per year as volunteers (paid standard wage plus costs). A position such as "president" might be full time, with limitations (even 8 years is too much!), but national/state senate/representatives would have only roughly 1/4 FTU "working" on politics.
I do agree that it should not be the top level government to implement this, at all. They are OK for national defence and serious crime, as well as co-ordination and describing ideals, but most other things should be handled at (much) lower levels. For example, if it decided that broadband is equivalent to a basic right, then the federal government should not try to implement it by itself, but rather provide a forum for states (which in turn provide forums for the next level
How that can end badly? Especially since a politician has a comprehensive economic plan that will create millions of good local jobs, ensure our nation's energy security, get the government's budget and spending practices in order, and bring relief to local consumers.
I've rolled your comment back to the template.
Congratulations on your ride on the tour bus!
- BASIC (or Pascal,if you're feeling sadistic. The logical steps/sequence in programming apply across all programming languages.)
I struggle with you definition of sadism.
As you can probably guess by my ID here, I have used Pascal extensively. The first language I learned though, was BASIC. It wasn't very good for writing programs longer than 3276 lines though.
I'll rephrase. It was designed as a simple teaching language. It is great for 20 line programs. It gets very shitty beyond that.
I'm not going to toot the horn of Pascal either. It is better than C and Java as a language to learn first, but only marginally so.
Logo and Forth. for starters. They are both easy to implement on very small computers.
And after that, javascript before basic. That would be sufficient base knowledge for simple PHP/etc.
Just say no to basic.
I work for a city, and the Librarian most emphatically does not have the right to give away, loan, or otherwise remove any city property. That is a crime.
How about books?
The reason that free software has poor usability is that free software is a subset of software, which is noted for poor usability.
The vast majority of software is written by and used by a single person, and would probably be hard to use for anybody else. Sometimes these projects get to be free.
Most of the remainder have a limited target, whether it is an in-house project or free. Some of these are easily usable, but the majority of companies will prefer more features to usability.
The tiny fraction of "big software" which has serious market penetration comes in three main categories: operating systems, utilities with a free version, and games. Operating systems typically have incredibly poor usability; really successful games almost all have decent usability.
The only real difference between free and commercial software is that the makers of the latter have a better chance of making a living off it.
\/\/@ u 7h1n|{ u r? 1337?
Shocking, isn't it?
"in STV, it's very hard to predict what impact your vote will actually have."
And this is worse than having to pick between the lesser of two evils exactly how?
STV will be imperfect if it is only used once every X years to decide a single position or issue, as is any other system. But it has the strength that it allows you to prioritise your candidates; with luck you will get your first (or perhaps second) choice, and it is to be hoped that widely unpopular candidates don't sneak in because the only other candidate is considered by many other voters to be "the lesser of two evils".
As an occasional Dutch-to-English translator, I've got to disagree with you. I grew up bilingual but my written Dutch isn't very good, yet when I went skiing some time before I was 10, I recall being able to read German comics (Tintin=Kuifje, so with more than kiddy dialogue) with no difficulty at all. Granted there were pictures to help, but the only question I had was why there was a B in their word for street!
English is actually closer to Frisian from a historical perspective, whilst Dutch is very similar to Low German as spoken across northern Germany and even into Poland. Of course English has the additional influence of Norman French added to the Angle and Saxon dialects of 1000 years ago, whilst Dutch has been influenced much later (from the Burgundians on, in Southern NL, much of northern NL was presumably not considered prime land until about the Dutch Golden Age, and Zeeland and various polders such as Schiphol were still very very wet. That and you had waterlinies).
Anyway, the vocabulary of Dutch is about halfway between those of it's neighbours to either side, but the grammar is essentially "German Lite". Pronunciation and intonation are also more like German than English.
A German will be able to say "misschien is uw Schevenginse scheermesje niet scherp genoeg" before a Dutchman manages a perfect "dough faced plough boy who coughed and laughed his way through Scarbrough", tho'!
Next thing you'll be saying they still sell RAM sufficient for your working set.
Probably because all these stories call this One Laptop Per Child, and only a few of them mention a $100 target cost.
Considering what a 1GB storage laptop would have cost 10 years ago, let alone 20, I think we can safely say that the COST target will be reached relatively soon - within 2-5 years.
As for the "per child" target, it may take a bit longer. Maybe 20-50. Consider the ever-increasing changes since 1945, less than a lifetime ago. If Nigeria has a million OLPCs next year, it will have close to a million times the processing power of Bletchley Park in WWII.
Tarmac
You misread.
The 4.3 clause says you can't hack other people.
The 4.4 clause says you CAN hack xs4all itself, as long as it is for research purposes which you will share with them.
They will be constructed in Taiwan. Perhaps in 10 years time the Nigerian ones will be constructed in Nigeria. The OS and keyboard will be localised. This is the modern, non-religious equivalent of missionaries. Missionaries have been treated badly often enough not to be nice, but have also chosen their battles - and OLPC is at the request of the receiving country, rather than air-dropped into hostile zones.
The terrorists want to blow up ALL OF LONDON!!! so they take 50 or so cell-phones, download custom ringtones made of people yelling at each other and then tape them up near the cameras in various innocuous locations around town.
Yes, this new invention will be useless until they develop some means of transmitting moving images from these so-called 'cameras' to Scotland Yard!!!
"The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak"
Or as translated into Russian, "The vodka is strong but the meat is rotten"
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
I see your Francis Sandow and raise you a Roderick Frederick Ronald William MacArthur McBan.
He started off rich - everybody on Norstrilia is cash-rich - but when he made enough in a single night to buy Old Earth itself, he was SERIOUSLY rich.
Perhaps some people use screen-savers, but would still like to have a visible indicator of when e-mail arrives?
>The age of simple software is once again coming to a close.
/.) dynamically, if you have a thread open in a tab? Not much harder than automating hitting refresh, with some XML and XSLT.
What makes you think that AJAX won't be made simple?
For example, how hard is it going to be to detect and download new posts in forums (such as
And it won't be needed for everything, by any means. Just a certain class of web apps which need to be able to run on multiple browsers (and also on dial-up/cell phones).
The FA states that this method is meant to deflect small asteroids. Not huge ones. It states it is meant to take decades, yet people post that the engines/fuel won't last that long.
The method is pretty obvious: put the big frozen fuel tank in a 'synchronous' orbit, and drag the (medium-sized, identified) asteroid up every time the tank gets pulled too close, or continuously, very slowly. Apparently the calculations may work; it is beneficial for the tank to be bulky, after all.
The whole point is that the risk is not from the massive, known asteroids, with known trajectories, nor the tiny ones too small to be a danger. It is from the small-medium ones which may be detected well in advance, i.e. on a previous incoming close visit, but which do need deflecting.
The science fiction version of this is a space shield with a number of these devices somehow ready to tag on to the orbit of an asteroid. And catching the orbit (in time) is the hardest part.
>>we now have 20 smaller ones
>That's why I said many low impact hits. Did you not even read my post?
Did you not even read the article?
>>>Despite the urge to give the asteroid a hardy tug, the key to moving an asteroid with gravity is to be gentle. An asteroid is likely to be loosely packed material, so tugging on it too hard could break it into unmanageable pieces.
To me, you are a troll.
NASA does put people in to space. It is a risky business, but the risk is no more or less with the Russians, statistically speaking.
I'm not saying NASA is perfect, by any means. I'm not an American either. But your rhetoric is just wrong.