I think it has to do with the age of the child (NYTimes article describes research experience with teenagers in North Carolina, BBC covers internet give to primary school age children at the schools in Uruguay). The research NYTimes profiles also shows an apparent difference according to the race of the teenager who gets broadband. Could it be that test scores have anything to do with anything else other than computer access? They need a control group, e.g. a country the size of Uruguay where they distribute Nintendo's and "Grand Theft Auto" instead of computers. My theory: prepubescents who get their online access at a public school (Uruguay) spend time accessing different educational websites than teenagers given broadband access in their rooms (NC).
I have seen paper shredding trucks arriving at the Google headquarters... I thought it was to take out confidential papers, but maybe it was a delivery?
Surge the spammers. It must take them some time to enter credit card information from the gullible people who actually respond to the spam. NATO should capitalize on that, and employ the armed forces to answer every spam solicitation with a "flytrap" credit card number. The spammers would see their responses spike but would be tied up wasting their time on non-productive responses. If the NATO guys from Germany are just sitting around in Afghanistan playing on their laptops and drinking beer, they could be multitasking and responding to spam with fake credit card numbers.
I hear you, but this deadline was set in 1996 (or actually, extended twice from a 2006 transition). Is the best outcome for broadasters to continue to hog BOTH digital AND analog bandwidth (the grace period they were given in 1996)? Or do you think the date is important to the community you describe? By the way, I own a company that takes the analog USA TVs and inspects them and sends the better ones to NTSC Peru, Mexico, and Venezuala, so I got a stake in this too.
The Telecommuncations Act of 1996 set a 10 year period to convert TV broadcasts from analog to digital. It has already been delayed twice. Barack Obama also came out against revamping the General Mining Act of 1872 (no joke).
Wikipedia describes B.Obama's careful, studied opposition to changing this 136 year old law without further study
Ummm... This could be a very, very, slow and deliberate 4 years until the next election.
Well, let's see the track record of the biggest consumer electronics green endeavor - lead free solder, enforced under ROHS. It replaces a very small amount of material (lead) which was 85% post consumer recycled content, with silver and tin which are mined from coral reefs. True, the waste when the product is thrown away (in a regulated, lined landfill in a rich green nation) is less toxic. Coral reefs and rain forest mining is a small price to pay. Perhaps we could make even less toxic, "organic" solder from baby seal pelts.
It's because the airwaves are owned by the public and regulated by the feds that it took this long to happen, and why they went to the effort to make black-and-white TVs work when color TV came in the 60s. After they auction all of the remaining airwaves by the end of the year, it will be private and a lot more like a Windows rollout (Oh? Your P2 doesn't work anymore? Feel shame and buy a new one).
I eventually realized that a "one in a million" idea or trait seems really unique to most of us, but that with 6 Billion people, that means one thousand other people had the same exact idea. That's now, and if you count the people who died already, it's even more humbling. All you can do is compete against the ones who will have your idea tomorrow, and try to outrun a person who had the idea yesterday. Fortunately, patent and trademark laws are designed to be so expensive that you don't have to worry about the people in India and China and Africa and South America who have the same idea and are smarter than you, as they cannot afford the patent process. Your challenge is to capitalize it (like Alain says) and make enough money to sue those guys when they "steal" their own idea, or the 100,000 others that didn't have the idea to begin with and steal it from all of you. It's called the gray market.
... will export computers. What is needed is for industry to set up rules which reform and raise the export standards, a la "Fair Trade Coffee". WR3A.org is one such group, UNCTAD is another. Unfortunately, the ugly pictures of junk exports scare ethical suppliers out of the export marketplace. Smugglers fill the demand and make money and mix in garbage units (buy one, get one 'free'). You can learn more about it by watching the movie "Traffic" than you can by reading the press (which is all over the GAO report as of this morning).
I know a couple of people who are trying to create wifi-to-wifi chains to mazimize internet access for their neighbors in the USA, and that is the fastest-growing method for new internet access in Africa. Comcast has reached the end of their rope (or cable, heh-heh) now that wifi is commonplace. Today their biggest competitor is not DSL, but bandwidth cannabalization (new potential clients lost to wifi broadcasts from current clients). I think that's the reason for the 'cap'.
I watched testimony about caps and bittorrents on C-span, and there is a review of that testimony at
CNET Politics and Law
The main issue was whether Comcast can legitimately set caps in order to protect stockholders, or whether Congress needs to get involved in monitoring the cap Comcast sets. I'd predict that eventually they will be able to reduce bandwidth, rather than cut it off entirely, because a "month" is a pretty clumsy unit of measure, like serving toast with a Catepillar bucketloader. They will have to let people make an emergency VOIP call, like cell phone service provider, and that will mean reducing bandwidth rather than cutting it off.
In a parallel universe... or, given an infinite amount of time, the NBC broadcast will eventually arrive at a place where the marching order is correct.
So, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
Gotta love the intellectual language - "Consistent with this explanation, all studies of suicide bombers indicate that they are significantly younger than not only the Muslim population in general but other (nonsuicidal) members of their own extreme political organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah."
An alternative explanation: people who commit suicide don't live as long.
And we should send our sewage back to the supermarkets.
And barbers should make us take our clippings home with us.
What the proposed "solution" neglects to do is show any value added, vs. the current system (in place for tires, auto batteries, fridges, mattresses) which is the consumer pays a $5 recycling fee at the end of life. California's "solution" costs 68 cents per pound, about 3 times the fees charged directly to residents.
I have a technique which should protect me. I call it "cookie camouflage", and I'd like someone to help me automate it. It is randomly directing google to search random, meaningless terms, from Aardvark to zenophobic. Using garbage in, garbage out, to my advantage, now I can state that any search done through my PC is random and meaningless to the authorati.
I first developed the technique when my wife was checking on my autofill commands. I had trouble erasing them, but it's pretty easy to make them so full of gibberish that nothing can be pinned on me. Not that I was searching anything I'd be ashamed of. Hentai is just a random H-word, after all.
Well, well, guess which are the only Original Equipment Manufacturers to come out and publicly back the "computer takeback" campaign? HP, Canon and Lexmark are supporting Maine's "recycling" legislation, which specifies that OEMs are in charge of recycling of their used products. Based on your experience at HP, this doesn't sound like environmental legislation as much as is "opportunistic obsolescence". Massachusetts just set up a traditional recycling program without involving the OEMs, and they are recycling 50 times more per capita than Maine is anyway.
http://www.computertakeback.com/legislation_and_ po licy/index.cfm
Hi, we have demand for old laptop and other LCD screens at our computer recycling plant in Middlebury, Vermont. The demand is repair-based (there's no silver or anything of value in them to justify the demand, unlike 286s and the like. There is a little bit of Hg, less than a fluorescent lamp). I'm sure other recyclers like us get the same inquiries from screen buyers, usually from Southeast Asia where they are being made. I visited a massive 4-story refurbisher city in Guangzhou, China, like a parking garage with 270 small flea-market/repair shops going on. My theory is that they have small fingers, big brains, and lots of time on their hands.
This spam buyer eradication program has already been going on for 6 months. Spam buyers are dropping like flies. Unfortunately, no media attention to date.
Ok, how about if several hundred of us actually decide to ORDER the crap in the worst spam (one comes to mind, which I get a dozen times per day, with a woman looking down a laughing guy's beach trunks). But, like, not pay for it, or use bad credit cards, or prank orders from Shirley U. Jest, or actually buy it and then file consumer complaints... something which will actually cost the spam company some real person time. Go after the 20% of companies sending 80% of the spam. No jury would convict us.
Currently 90% of Americans get TV from cable or satellite. For the remaining 10%, FCC/taxpayers are giving away free not one but TWO bandwidths, one for digital transmission and the other for analogue. FCC says they'll re-auction the analogue in 2007. But the broadcasters (arguably the nation's most powerful federal lobby) are saying that's a maybe.
AOL/TW, GE, Disney, Fox... they are planning wireless internet or subscription use alright, but not free.
Slashdot Mirror
BBC coverage of one laptop per child in Uruguay
I think it has to do with the age of the child (NYTimes article describes research experience with teenagers in North Carolina, BBC covers internet give to primary school age children at the schools in Uruguay). The research NYTimes profiles also shows an apparent difference according to the race of the teenager who gets broadband. Could it be that test scores have anything to do with anything else other than computer access? They need a control group, e.g. a country the size of Uruguay where they distribute Nintendo's and "Grand Theft Auto" instead of computers. My theory: prepubescents who get their online access at a public school (Uruguay) spend time accessing different educational websites than teenagers given broadband access in their rooms (NC).
I have seen paper shredding trucks arriving at the Google headquarters... I thought it was to take out confidential papers, but maybe it was a delivery?
Surge the spammers. It must take them some time to enter credit card information from the gullible people who actually respond to the spam. NATO should capitalize on that, and employ the armed forces to answer every spam solicitation with a "flytrap" credit card number. The spammers would see their responses spike but would be tied up wasting their time on non-productive responses. If the NATO guys from Germany are just sitting around in Afghanistan playing on their laptops and drinking beer, they could be multitasking and responding to spam with fake credit card numbers.
General Motors got a NSF grant as part of the stimulus package, and the 1G SMs are being used now to cut apart "Bugs" Bin Laden's Tora Bora hideaway.
And opposes reform of the General Mining Act of 1872...
I hear you, but this deadline was set in 1996 (or actually, extended twice from a 2006 transition). Is the best outcome for broadasters to continue to hog BOTH digital AND analog bandwidth (the grace period they were given in 1996)? Or do you think the date is important to the community you describe? By the way, I own a company that takes the analog USA TVs and inspects them and sends the better ones to NTSC Peru, Mexico, and Venezuala, so I got a stake in this too.
Ummm... This could be a very, very, slow and deliberate 4 years until the next election.
Well, let's see the track record of the biggest consumer electronics green endeavor - lead free solder, enforced under ROHS. It replaces a very small amount of material (lead) which was 85% post consumer recycled content, with silver and tin which are mined from coral reefs. True, the waste when the product is thrown away (in a regulated, lined landfill in a rich green nation) is less toxic. Coral reefs and rain forest mining is a small price to pay. Perhaps we could make even less toxic, "organic" solder from baby seal pelts.
It's because the airwaves are owned by the public and regulated by the feds that it took this long to happen, and why they went to the effort to make black-and-white TVs work when color TV came in the 60s. After they auction all of the remaining airwaves by the end of the year, it will be private and a lot more like a Windows rollout (Oh? Your P2 doesn't work anymore? Feel shame and buy a new one).
I eventually realized that a "one in a million" idea or trait seems really unique to most of us, but that with 6 Billion people, that means one thousand other people had the same exact idea. That's now, and if you count the people who died already, it's even more humbling. All you can do is compete against the ones who will have your idea tomorrow, and try to outrun a person who had the idea yesterday. Fortunately, patent and trademark laws are designed to be so expensive that you don't have to worry about the people in India and China and Africa and South America who have the same idea and are smarter than you, as they cannot afford the patent process. Your challenge is to capitalize it (like Alain says) and make enough money to sue those guys when they "steal" their own idea, or the 100,000 others that didn't have the idea to begin with and steal it from all of you. It's called the gray market.
... will export computers. What is needed is for industry to set up rules which reform and raise the export standards, a la "Fair Trade Coffee". WR3A.org is one such group, UNCTAD is another. Unfortunately, the ugly pictures of junk exports scare ethical suppliers out of the export marketplace. Smugglers fill the demand and make money and mix in garbage units (buy one, get one 'free'). You can learn more about it by watching the movie "Traffic" than you can by reading the press (which is all over the GAO report as of this morning).
"Pg Dn... It's not a particularly silly keystroke, now is it?"
I know a couple of people who are trying to create wifi-to-wifi chains to mazimize internet access for their neighbors in the USA, and that is the fastest-growing method for new internet access in Africa. Comcast has reached the end of their rope (or cable, heh-heh) now that wifi is commonplace. Today their biggest competitor is not DSL, but bandwidth cannabalization (new potential clients lost to wifi broadcasts from current clients). I think that's the reason for the 'cap'.
I watched testimony about caps and bittorrents on C-span, and there is a review of that testimony at CNET Politics and Law The main issue was whether Comcast can legitimately set caps in order to protect stockholders, or whether Congress needs to get involved in monitoring the cap Comcast sets. I'd predict that eventually they will be able to reduce bandwidth, rather than cut it off entirely, because a "month" is a pretty clumsy unit of measure, like serving toast with a Catepillar bucketloader. They will have to let people make an emergency VOIP call, like cell phone service provider, and that will mean reducing bandwidth rather than cutting it off.
In a parallel universe... or, given an infinite amount of time, the NBC broadcast will eventually arrive at a place where the marching order is correct. So, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
Gotta love the intellectual language - "Consistent with this explanation, all studies of suicide bombers indicate that they are significantly younger than not only the Muslim population in general but other (nonsuicidal) members of their own extreme political organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah."
An alternative explanation: people who commit suicide don't live as long.
And we should send our sewage back to the supermarkets. And barbers should make us take our clippings home with us. What the proposed "solution" neglects to do is show any value added, vs. the current system (in place for tires, auto batteries, fridges, mattresses) which is the consumer pays a $5 recycling fee at the end of life. California's "solution" costs 68 cents per pound, about 3 times the fees charged directly to residents.
I have a technique which should protect me. I call it "cookie camouflage", and I'd like someone to help me automate it. It is randomly directing google to search random, meaningless terms, from Aardvark to zenophobic. Using garbage in, garbage out, to my advantage, now I can state that any search done through my PC is random and meaningless to the authorati.
I first developed the technique when my wife was checking on my autofill commands. I had trouble erasing them, but it's pretty easy to make them so full of gibberish that nothing can be pinned on me. Not that I was searching anything I'd be ashamed of. Hentai is just a random H-word, after all.
Well, well, guess which are the only Original Equipment Manufacturers to come out and publicly back the "computer takeback" campaign? HP, Canon and Lexmark are supporting Maine's "recycling" legislation, which specifies that OEMs are in charge of recycling of their used products. Based on your experience at HP, this doesn't sound like environmental legislation as much as is "opportunistic obsolescence". Massachusetts just set up a traditional recycling program without involving the OEMs, and they are recycling 50 times more per capita than Maine is anyway.
_ po licy/index.cfm
http://www.computertakeback.com/legislation_and
Hi, we have demand for old laptop and other LCD screens at our computer recycling plant in Middlebury, Vermont. The demand is repair-based (there's no silver or anything of value in them to justify the demand, unlike 286s and the like. There is a little bit of Hg, less than a fluorescent lamp). I'm sure other recyclers like us get the same inquiries from screen buyers, usually from Southeast Asia where they are being made. I visited a massive 4-story refurbisher city in Guangzhou, China, like a parking garage with 270 small flea-market/repair shops going on. My theory is that they have small fingers, big brains, and lots of time on their hands.
This spam buyer eradication program has already been going on for 6 months. Spam buyers are dropping like flies. Unfortunately, no media attention to date.
Ok, how about if several hundred of us actually decide to ORDER the crap in the worst spam (one comes to mind, which I get a dozen times per day, with a woman looking down a laughing guy's beach trunks). But, like, not pay for it, or use bad credit cards, or prank orders from Shirley U. Jest, or actually buy it and then file consumer complaints... something which will actually cost the spam company some real person time. Go after the 20% of companies sending 80% of the spam. No jury would convict us.
I have 7 email addresses for different business purposes. The 2 Adelphia.net addresses account for 80% of the spam I receive, about 80 per day.
Currently 90% of Americans get TV from cable or satellite. For the remaining 10%, FCC/taxpayers are giving away free not one but TWO bandwidths, one for digital transmission and the other for analogue. FCC says they'll re-auction the analogue in 2007. But the broadcasters (arguably the nation's most powerful federal lobby) are saying that's a maybe. AOL/TW, GE, Disney, Fox... they are planning wireless internet or subscription use alright, but not free.