It was an example of the size of a book in readily recognizable terms, not a recommendation for content. There is no more recognizable unit of measure to work with.
I'm quite serious. It's these tablets that just a few months ago were seeming quite unrealistic, the stuff of science fiction. It seems the pace of progress these days is quite brisk. Do try to keep up.
I'm quite serious. These tablets are themselves from a sci-fi novel - and a not-so-very old one at that - but they are nevertheless realizable in the near term. The pace of progress is picking up quite a bit.
When my grandfather died men had not yet walked on the moon and the very idea was laughable science fiction. My mother was quite the successful medical professional and now I carry more books in my pocket each day (several thousand) than she ever read in her life. We have things now like Khan Academy and Open Courseware that offer the modern connected person with the time, ability and inclination the opportunity to learn many things that were once the secrets of a privileged few. And of course material facts like the seventh US President's policy on federal debt are but a google away, when once upon a time to discover such a thing you needed access to a good library with an encyclopedia.
These things are not just possible but inevitable. You cannot stop them no matter how much you protest because the fusion of information and communication means that knowledge will penetrate into the darkest spaces even against determined opposition. All you do in the attempt is reveal your bigotry. You think the impoverished are in some way inferior when in fact you are no better than them. It seems likely the stone of suffering has honed their wit substantially. You just have the advantage of more plentiful resources, chief among them knowledge about how to do things more easily, safely and comfortably - and not because of any personal merit but by accident of birth.
People are lazy. Show them an easy way to do something and they'll take it every time.
1) The full King James Bible (unillustrated, and a formidable text) in epub format is about 1.6MB. 20,000 of that would be 32GB - well within the capacity of a tablet like this, though it might raise the cost another $5. Funding better schools (even if it were possible and it's not - there's no money) will not improve the dropout rate because it arises from different social issues: the need for the students to subsist. But with this? It's a library in your pocket. For much of history a school was a log with a teacher on one end and a student on the other. Knowledge is the means the poor need to lift themselves up without outside help. As they know more, better ways to do things, they will have more leisure and the need will pass. With this the poor can take their schooling now where they need to be instead of sacrificing their needs to go to school. There are no resources to feed, clothe and house them while they do that. The poverty line in these places is $6 per YEAR. There's no lack of labor for them to teach each other to read. They're not stupid, they're just struggling too hard to take 12 years out of their youth to attend school. In some places just gathering a lot of children into a fixed place regularly is a tempting prize that makes the practice unsafe, as children are a labor pool and that's an asset too.
2) Even in the finer suburbs of America you will find folk who believe relief of subluxation of the spine can cure diabetes, that the most potent medicines are the most highly diluted, that cancer can be cured by bombarding a tumor with beta radiation. There's only so much you can do, but raising the general level of education improves the average lot. Average people are still going to be average, and half of everybody is going to be even worse.
3) The bigger danger is that the thing is an asset among folks who have few, it contains knowledge that empowers people to subsist. In some places to be caught with an asset or forbidden knowledge is near certain death. Some will be lost or broken, it's true. That's why it's essential they be cheap: so we can afford to send many of them - making them less worth stealing, making the knowledge so available it can't be forbidden. It has to be small so it can be smuggled and hidden. It has to have enough local culture, history and knowledge to be valued, and the ability to add more. It has to require no infrastructure whatever - not even power. And if we send 10 million $35 tablets to India and such places, what does it cost? $350M. For what you get that's a hell of a deal because self-sufficient people neither want nor need our other help.
We're thinking about different things. You're thinking iPad 2, I'm thinking about something completely different. I'm thinking Boy Scout Handbook x 20,000. It still doesn't happen accidentally. You don't really just airdrop these into Africa and India and North Korea. You need to have a seed of people who know what they are, to clandestinely distribute them, to teach about teaching and self-sufficiency and so on. It's not fast either.
We hear you. You make great sense. Please ignore the jerks. The Internet is full of jerks but it has good people too. This stuff is coming and to these folks it will be free. It will hold enough information to help people live successful, healthy, educated lives without imposing any burden on them. They will not require power or wireless, or anything else. And there will be a LOT of them.
They will still have to work but if they will work together all other things are possible.
Now would be a good time for you to propose a low-tech alternative to a cheap tablet that holds 20,000 books about the sciences, history, the arts - that promotes literacy and hygiene and medicine. It should include instructions for various good practices such as sustainable agriculture, clean well digging and sanitary sewage practices, mortuary and food preparation practices among other things - in native language or with a suitable translation engine. All subjects introductory to advanced in math, chemistry, biology, mechanical and electrical engineering and history must be included. It must contain enough information to be able to uplift an entire village out of the stone age and into the space age - in a 7" tablet form factor that can be hidden, trekked across the desert and charged by laying it in the sun.
Ideally this low-tech solution should weigh less than half a kilogram and cost less than $35 - durable and disposable enough to smuggle into or airdrop from drones into places like southern China, North Korea, India, the Phillipines and Arkanas.
The Iconia A500 is a fantastic device and now that they've dropped the price a great value too. At first they were trying to sell it for the same price as the Transformer without the USP of the keyboard dock. I very nearly bought one anyway, but finally found the Transformer in stock. At $300 a great value and a good recommend even if you're not into rooting and modding. You can get a bluetooth tablet keyboard and case for it if you want the keyboard. Has HDMI out and widescreen format like the transformer (both of which features totally rock!)
Yeah, Android tablets do that now. Not my specialty, but I've seen it done. Maybe Goodreader.
eink is for outside or insane (weeks) battery life. If you're not going to read outside and you don't need the battery life, you'll prefer a color display.
Wanted to mention that there's something particularly killer about the Transformer's charging block. When I plug my phone into it, it charges in like 1/4th the time.
I can confirm this. Very happy with the Transformer. Could sell it today for near what I paid too - so they're not depreciating as fast as some tablets.
It was this afternoon. Get this: they helped write this bill. They funded it. They're written into it as an exception, and a holding registrar for seized domains. They let their arrow fly. If these bills pass GoDaddy cannot escape blame for the harm they do, repentant or not. It's in their best interest now to ensure that these bills are killed deader than Canasta.
If they do manage to kill it then they're just stupid and negligent. Which many of us could let go.
With sarcasm you leave some clue that the stated is intended humor, though it might only be understood such later. This is difficult to do online when you don't have vocal cues to work from. Sometimes it can be worked out from absurd pretext. To do it in a single printed word is high art. You didn't do that. I do admire the audacity of the attempt though. It's a trick I've only achieved twice.
The parent post was modded down from +5 to -1 to suppress the implied endorsement of the former/. user twitter, once the most prolific submitter and poster on/. now silenced by abusive moderation. When twitter was posting,/. was in growth mode. Now it's not. These two facts may or may not have a causal relationship, but they are indisputable historical facts.
Slashdot Mirror
It was an example of the size of a book in readily recognizable terms, not a recommendation for content. There is no more recognizable unit of measure to work with.
I'm quite serious. It's these tablets that just a few months ago were seeming quite unrealistic, the stuff of science fiction. It seems the pace of progress these days is quite brisk. Do try to keep up.
I'm quite serious. These tablets are themselves from a sci-fi novel - and a not-so-very old one at that - but they are nevertheless realizable in the near term. The pace of progress is picking up quite a bit.
When my grandfather died men had not yet walked on the moon and the very idea was laughable science fiction. My mother was quite the successful medical professional and now I carry more books in my pocket each day (several thousand) than she ever read in her life. We have things now like Khan Academy and Open Courseware that offer the modern connected person with the time, ability and inclination the opportunity to learn many things that were once the secrets of a privileged few. And of course material facts like the seventh US President's policy on federal debt are but a google away, when once upon a time to discover such a thing you needed access to a good library with an encyclopedia.
These things are not just possible but inevitable. You cannot stop them no matter how much you protest because the fusion of information and communication means that knowledge will penetrate into the darkest spaces even against determined opposition. All you do in the attempt is reveal your bigotry. You think the impoverished are in some way inferior when in fact you are no better than them. It seems likely the stone of suffering has honed their wit substantially. You just have the advantage of more plentiful resources, chief among them knowledge about how to do things more easily, safely and comfortably - and not because of any personal merit but by accident of birth.
People are lazy. Show them an easy way to do something and they'll take it every time.
1) The full King James Bible (unillustrated, and a formidable text) in epub format is about 1.6MB. 20,000 of that would be 32GB - well within the capacity of a tablet like this, though it might raise the cost another $5. Funding better schools (even if it were possible and it's not - there's no money) will not improve the dropout rate because it arises from different social issues: the need for the students to subsist. But with this? It's a library in your pocket. For much of history a school was a log with a teacher on one end and a student on the other. Knowledge is the means the poor need to lift themselves up without outside help. As they know more, better ways to do things, they will have more leisure and the need will pass. With this the poor can take their schooling now where they need to be instead of sacrificing their needs to go to school. There are no resources to feed, clothe and house them while they do that. The poverty line in these places is $6 per YEAR. There's no lack of labor for them to teach each other to read. They're not stupid, they're just struggling too hard to take 12 years out of their youth to attend school. In some places just gathering a lot of children into a fixed place regularly is a tempting prize that makes the practice unsafe, as children are a labor pool and that's an asset too.
2) Even in the finer suburbs of America you will find folk who believe relief of subluxation of the spine can cure diabetes, that the most potent medicines are the most highly diluted, that cancer can be cured by bombarding a tumor with beta radiation. There's only so much you can do, but raising the general level of education improves the average lot. Average people are still going to be average, and half of everybody is going to be even worse.
3) The bigger danger is that the thing is an asset among folks who have few, it contains knowledge that empowers people to subsist. In some places to be caught with an asset or forbidden knowledge is near certain death. Some will be lost or broken, it's true. That's why it's essential they be cheap: so we can afford to send many of them - making them less worth stealing, making the knowledge so available it can't be forbidden. It has to be small so it can be smuggled and hidden. It has to have enough local culture, history and knowledge to be valued, and the ability to add more. It has to require no infrastructure whatever - not even power. And if we send 10 million $35 tablets to India and such places, what does it cost? $350M. For what you get that's a hell of a deal because self-sufficient people neither want nor need our other help.
We're thinking about different things. You're thinking iPad 2, I'm thinking about something completely different. I'm thinking Boy Scout Handbook x 20,000. It still doesn't happen accidentally. You don't really just airdrop these into Africa and India and North Korea. You need to have a seed of people who know what they are, to clandestinely distribute them, to teach about teaching and self-sufficiency and so on. It's not fast either.
We hear you. You make great sense. Please ignore the jerks. The Internet is full of jerks but it has good people too. This stuff is coming and to these folks it will be free. It will hold enough information to help people live successful, healthy, educated lives without imposing any burden on them. They will not require power or wireless, or anything else. And there will be a LOT of them.
They will still have to work but if they will work together all other things are possible.
Now would be a good time for you to propose a low-tech alternative to a cheap tablet that holds 20,000 books about the sciences, history, the arts - that promotes literacy and hygiene and medicine. It should include instructions for various good practices such as sustainable agriculture, clean well digging and sanitary sewage practices, mortuary and food preparation practices among other things - in native language or with a suitable translation engine. All subjects introductory to advanced in math, chemistry, biology, mechanical and electrical engineering and history must be included. It must contain enough information to be able to uplift an entire village out of the stone age and into the space age - in a 7" tablet form factor that can be hidden, trekked across the desert and charged by laying it in the sun.
Ideally this low-tech solution should weigh less than half a kilogram and cost less than $35 - durable and disposable enough to smuggle into or airdrop from drones into places like southern China, North Korea, India, the Phillipines and Arkanas.
What did you have in mind?
The Iconia A500 is a fantastic device and now that they've dropped the price a great value too. At first they were trying to sell it for the same price as the Transformer without the USP of the keyboard dock. I very nearly bought one anyway, but finally found the Transformer in stock. At $300 a great value and a good recommend even if you're not into rooting and modding. You can get a bluetooth tablet keyboard and case for it if you want the keyboard. Has HDMI out and widescreen format like the transformer (both of which features totally rock!)
Yeah, Android tablets do that now. Not my specialty, but I've seen it done. Maybe Goodreader. eink is for outside or insane (weeks) battery life. If you're not going to read outside and you don't need the battery life, you'll prefer a color display.
Wanted to mention that there's something particularly killer about the Transformer's charging block. When I plug my phone into it, it charges in like 1/4th the time.
Bluetooth headset for video calling is definitely the way to go. And Google Talk (video) works on the Transformer also. I use it to chat with my kids.
I can confirm this. Very happy with the Transformer. Could sell it today for near what I paid too - so they're not depreciating as fast as some tablets.
It was this afternoon. Get this: they helped write this bill. They funded it. They're written into it as an exception, and a holding registrar for seized domains. They let their arrow fly. If these bills pass GoDaddy cannot escape blame for the harm they do, repentant or not. It's in their best interest now to ensure that these bills are killed deader than Canasta.
If they do manage to kill it then they're just stupid and negligent. Which many of us could let go.
Moto will be along presently.
Embracing Android by Paul Thurrot.
I think the tablet will be interesting.
BTW: that's twice out of hundreds of attempts. I'm not trying to pretend I'm good at it.
With sarcasm you leave some clue that the stated is intended humor, though it might only be understood such later. This is difficult to do online when you don't have vocal cues to work from. Sometimes it can be worked out from absurd pretext. To do it in a single printed word is high art. You didn't do that. I do admire the audacity of the attempt though. It's a trick I've only achieved twice.
Since you're the one who asked the question and consider it answered, I'll move on to the next question. With due respect, regards.
Yes.
If there ever was a case for /. abuse of moderation, the parent post is it. If it's not fixed, they don't care.
Here too now. I wonder how many modpoints they have.... It's almost like I'm trying to be a honeypot.
The parent post was modded down from +5 to -1 to suppress the implied endorsement of the former /. user twitter, once the most prolific submitter and poster on /. now silenced by abusive moderation. When twitter was posting, /. was in growth mode. Now it's not. These two facts may or may not have a causal relationship, but they are indisputable historical facts.
10% is way over. Maybe 0.1% on the high end. It's an O(n) thing.
Ouch. And now the twitter hater moderators have showed up. Fuck you guys. twitter was good for us. You shitheads are killing /.
We don't do that here.