I used to work in the airline business in Minneapolis. Rochester, MN, home to the Mayo Clinic, is just a small commuter flight away. A lot of people would fly there for hospitalization from around the country and around the world. We regularly had trouble with people on their way home from Mayo who would get to Minneapolis then require an ambulance upon arrival because of problems with blood clots, lung function and other issues resulting from flying in a small seat on an airplane in a lower-pressure atmosphere.
If you have surgery for some reason wait until you go flying.
I wonder what would happen if we started taking baby pictures in infrared. Maybe NASA just thought of something that every Sears Portrait Studio should offer.
1. Take baby photos in infrared 2. See stars and other galaxies 3. PROFIT!
I think there were a lot of women who worked hard for the war effort who didn't get and who often didn't seek recognition for what they were doing. They were just doing their part to help win the war. My granny worked for the MI6 in London during WW2 as a code cipherer. She worked 18 hr days with a rest day inbetween. None of the men in her job category did such a thing. I think she determined that this made her highly productive and her superiors went for it. She participated in some really amazing stuff and didn't talk about it until the later years of her life.
Nowadays you have a generation of women who call themselves feminists... but are they really? They may be women who work but do they work hard in order to really advance the cause or do they do it so they can have recognition? A degree in Women's Studies doesn't make the world a better place. So many supposed feminists point to Hillary Rodham Clinton as a good role model. Hillary though stood by while her husband cheated on her then wrote a book about it. Would a real feminist do something like that?
It is hard for me to fathom television in which something relevant and intelligent is presented, with a slight bit of profanity (just enough but not too much) and where the crowd is excited to hear it. Instead I turn on my television in the US and see the bitter dregs of society: The Real Housewives of..., Jersey Shore, anything on the Oprah network, etc. Perhaps Dr. Goldacre has a placebo cure for those kinds of shows?
Great, so the rest of us non-European cell phone users roaming on foreign networks will have to pay more. They have to make their money somewhere. They will just charge whoever will pay it. The US government won't come to the aid of Americans wanting a reasonable roaming rate so it's almost a guarantee of higher roaming charges!
People with degrees know that the ONLY way out of student loan payments is death. Maybe after dealing with student lenders death doesn't seem so bad anymore.
China's turboprops in the modern era are all Russian designs. The ARJ21 is a ripoff of the MD90 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_ARJ21. The C919 is an Airbus 320 20 years too late. There is no innovation here, just borrowing. That's OK though, right?
You are so correct! People who are only capable of speaking in total profanity are so employable and so admirable. They are society's success stories. Yes the ghetto people in the back of the bus and on the street corner who most people choose to avoid or walk on the other side of the street from. We should teach all our children to talk like that because it is the way of the future. I hear so many doctors, professors, lawyers and other educated folk talking all ghetto or redneck all the time. It gives me total reassurance in their abilities. This has nothing to do with old age or the "past", this is a perversion of societal norms.
This isn't much of a surprise to me anymore. In previous generations we idolized decent, intelligent, articulate and educated people. Somewhere it was decided that nobody can or should have to aspire to be any of those things and we should just aim for mediocrity because EVERYONE can be mediocre!
At least in the US I am seeing this perpetual dumbing-down of the culture (some will argue here that the US culture was pretty dumb to begin with hehehe). Instead of "dressing for success" kids now wear these pants that sag down to their knees. This is a holdover from the prison culture where clothes are baggy and ill-fitting. Reality TV idolizes people who are often foul, vulgar, have no education and oh yeah, don't have any kind of gainful employment. What do we learn from shows like The Hills or Jersey Shore? Instead of keeping rigid and tough education requirements, public schools in the US have been dumbed-down so that "everyone gets a chance." Well I have some news - in the real world, nobody gets a chance, you have to work your ass off to get anywhere.
I'm sure there are some legitimate e-waste recyclers in the developed world but they are far and few between. Most of this stuff is pawned off on places like Nigeria, India and China where those people are forced to contend with toxic metals, burning plastic, strong acids and harmful processes performed in unregulated back-alley operations.
If we don't recycle it responsibly it just gets disposed of in some toxic manner in another country. I think it's about time we attach a disposal fee or tax on all these things at the time of purchase. The product cycle on most electronics is rather short. It WILL be disposed of sometime and that interval gets to be less and less. "Out of sight, out of mind" doesn't get rid of the pollution, it just sends it to some other country. That other country is still on this earth though.
Why can't we just put in reasonable computer labs with Internet connections?
Location. If someone has to walk 3 miles to go to the nearest place with a computer lab, they aren't going to go that often. If they have a laptop close by, they are more apt to use it.
3.) Access to teachers in school (and tech support...).
Actually, I think that may be more of a negative than a positive for most kids. Most teachers are rather controlling with computers, most kids with their own computer could go more in depth with it. I don't know about anyone else, but generally on school computers I at least tried to do nothing more than what the teacher said, after all no use getting in trouble. But on my home PC I experimented with things, bootloaders, operating systems, drivers, system files, and really, it was because of this that I got interested in computers. If my only experience with computers was at school, I would have probably turned out to be one of those people who know nothing more than Windows, Word and Excel, who thinks to use HTML you must be some 1337 coder and PowerPoint usage makes you some computer wizard.
Really, the OLPC program was a success, not only in transforming the lives of thousands of kids in third world countries, but by making computers more affordable for the first world as well with the advent of the netbook.
Why can't we just put in reasonable computer labs with Internet connections?
Location. If someone has to walk 3 miles to go to the nearest place with a computer lab, they aren't going to go that often. If they have a laptop close by, they are more apt to use it.
3.) Access to teachers in school (and tech support...).
Actually, I think that may be more of a negative than a positive for most kids. Most teachers are rather controlling with computers, most kids with their own computer could go more in depth with it. I don't know about anyone else, but generally on school computers I at least tried to do nothing more than what the teacher said, after all no use getting in trouble. But on my home PC I experimented with things, bootloaders, operating systems, drivers, system files, and really, it was because of this that I got interested in computers. If my only experience with computers was at school, I would have probably turned out to be one of those people who know nothing more than Windows, Word and Excel, who thinks to use HTML you must be some 1337 coder and PowerPoint usage makes you some computer wizard.
Really, the OLPC program was a success, not only in transforming the lives of thousands of kids in third world countries, but by making computers more affordable for the first world as well with the advent of the netbook.
You make some good points. I guess let me elaborate my stance a bit. At THIS TIME, the OLPC may be jumping a bit far. We need to at least START OUT with reasonable computer labs for these kids to use. They need to become at least familiar with the basic concepts of computing before we give them laptops to take home and experiment with. You have to toss around one ball before you can juggle 3 or 4!
Personally, I started using computers when I was 5 yrs old, in Kindergarten. Our school had a lab full of Commodore 64s and Apple IIs. My parents had recently been given a Commodore 64 as a gift and they had no clue how to use it. I learned at least the basic steps on the Commodore and was able to build from there. Were they going to let me sit around and hack things in the school computer lab? No. But they gave me a good place to start and the computer lab instructors were rather resourceful and I felt I could always come to them for advice. One of them I even called up over the summer and she was more than glad to help me out!
That computer lab experience as a young child, coupled with the fact that my mom and dad couldn't figure out this new-f
It is nice that they want to make laptops for these kids but I think they are overdoing it. It seems like the proponents are more enthralled with the sizzle rather than the steak. Why can't we just put in reasonable computer labs with Internet connections?
I studied in Mexico for a while and it is quite common for many people, especially kids, to go to the neighborhood Internet cafe and pay a small fee to use their computers. There were always lots of kids there and they didn't mind that it was a "community" computer. While it would be nice to give everyone laptops, the whole idea of providing computing to masses of schoolchildren in the developing world needs to at least start with computer labs in the schools.
Fundamentally I see problems with giving kids in the developing world laptops: 1.) These are poor countries and the devices may be lost/stolen/sold to pay for essentials of life 2.) Not likely to have Internet access at home, may not even have reliable electricity 3.) Access to teachers in school (and tech support...).
I think they just wanted to make glitz and glamor out of this. The idea of a computer lab is not very sexy when compared to giving kids expensive pieces of hardware which will magically transform their lives.
I guess on that token, regular landlines and electricity are luxuries too. I don't absolutely need a telephone to live, nor do I need electricity. All I really need are air, water and food. Air is generally here. Water, I guess I could go out to the well and pump it. Oh wait I don't have one of those. I pay the city to pump it for me and deliver it in the faucet. Food? I go to the store for that. But then I bring it home and it requires refrigeration which requires power. Just like the 1800's, right?
Schools are a bit different. Courts have ruled that schools essentially operate "in loco parentis", or "in the place of the parents" while class is in session. While cases have ruled "Constitutional rights do not necessarily end at the schoolhouse door," they are permitted to do things which are reasonable to ensure security to the school, like search bags.
My Granny just turned 84 this week. Yes, she is losing it. That's what happens when you get to be that age. Well she is sort of losing it, not all. She does drive and cook. But she does not drive very much (I'd be surprised if it was more than 1000 mi/yr!) and the place she lives serves lunch and dinner. I try and keep an eye on her!
While this is a great product, I can see people like my granny going nuts over this. She can't handle the TV anymore (called me because it wouldn't work - I guess it has to be plugged in!), the telephone (has no idea how voicemail works, thinks that I am my answering machine). When lightbulbs exist that won't turn off, that might just be over the top.
At a job I had a long time ago (in a call center), the supervisor was ultra-paranoid about food and especially beverage around the computers. Turns out a few years ago, someone spilled no more than a spoonful of soup into the keyboard of a Wyse terminal. This somehow fried out the whole terminal, which then sent some kind of surge up the serial connection which then fried out the terminal server and a few other terminals connected to the same terminal server. Sounds ridiculous, I agree, but this wasn't the kind of guy who made exagerrated stories.
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I used to work in the airline business in Minneapolis. Rochester, MN, home to the Mayo Clinic, is just a small commuter flight away. A lot of people would fly there for hospitalization from around the country and around the world. We regularly had trouble with people on their way home from Mayo who would get to Minneapolis then require an ambulance upon arrival because of problems with blood clots, lung function and other issues resulting from flying in a small seat on an airplane in a lower-pressure atmosphere.
If you have surgery for some reason wait until you go flying.
I wonder what would happen if we started taking baby pictures in infrared. Maybe NASA just thought of something that every Sears Portrait Studio should offer.
1. Take baby photos in infrared
2. See stars and other galaxies
3. PROFIT!
I think there were a lot of women who worked hard for the war effort who didn't get and who often didn't seek recognition for what they were doing. They were just doing their part to help win the war. My granny worked for the MI6 in London during WW2 as a code cipherer. She worked 18 hr days with a rest day inbetween. None of the men in her job category did such a thing. I think she determined that this made her highly productive and her superiors went for it. She participated in some really amazing stuff and didn't talk about it until the later years of her life.
Nowadays you have a generation of women who call themselves feminists... but are they really? They may be women who work but do they work hard in order to really advance the cause or do they do it so they can have recognition? A degree in Women's Studies doesn't make the world a better place. So many supposed feminists point to Hillary Rodham Clinton as a good role model. Hillary though stood by while her husband cheated on her then wrote a book about it. Would a real feminist do something like that?
What I would give to have at least SOME of the BBC channels. We do have BBC America and I watch it religiously. But I could go for more, lots more.
It is hard for me to fathom television in which something relevant and intelligent is presented, with a slight bit of profanity (just enough but not too much) and where the crowd is excited to hear it. Instead I turn on my television in the US and see the bitter dregs of society: The Real Housewives of ..., Jersey Shore, anything on the Oprah network, etc. Perhaps Dr. Goldacre has a placebo cure for those kinds of shows?
Great, so the rest of us non-European cell phone users roaming on foreign networks will have to pay more. They have to make their money somewhere. They will just charge whoever will pay it. The US government won't come to the aid of Americans wanting a reasonable roaming rate so it's almost a guarantee of higher roaming charges!
People with degrees know that the ONLY way out of student loan payments is death. Maybe after dealing with student lenders death doesn't seem so bad anymore.
China's turboprops in the modern era are all Russian designs. The ARJ21 is a ripoff of the MD90 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_ARJ21. The C919 is an Airbus 320 20 years too late. There is no innovation here, just borrowing. That's OK though, right?
You are so correct! People who are only capable of speaking in total profanity are so employable and so admirable. They are society's success stories. Yes the ghetto people in the back of the bus and on the street corner who most people choose to avoid or walk on the other side of the street from. We should teach all our children to talk like that because it is the way of the future. I hear so many doctors, professors, lawyers and other educated folk talking all ghetto or redneck all the time. It gives me total reassurance in their abilities. This has nothing to do with old age or the "past", this is a perversion of societal norms.
This isn't much of a surprise to me anymore. In previous generations we idolized decent, intelligent, articulate and educated people. Somewhere it was decided that nobody can or should have to aspire to be any of those things and we should just aim for mediocrity because EVERYONE can be mediocre!
At least in the US I am seeing this perpetual dumbing-down of the culture (some will argue here that the US culture was pretty dumb to begin with hehehe). Instead of "dressing for success" kids now wear these pants that sag down to their knees. This is a holdover from the prison culture where clothes are baggy and ill-fitting. Reality TV idolizes people who are often foul, vulgar, have no education and oh yeah, don't have any kind of gainful employment. What do we learn from shows like The Hills or Jersey Shore? Instead of keeping rigid and tough education requirements, public schools in the US have been dumbed-down so that "everyone gets a chance." Well I have some news - in the real world, nobody gets a chance, you have to work your ass off to get anywhere.
I'm sure there are some legitimate e-waste recyclers in the developed world but they are far and few between. Most of this stuff is pawned off on places like Nigeria, India and China where those people are forced to contend with toxic metals, burning plastic, strong acids and harmful processes performed in unregulated back-alley operations.
If we don't recycle it responsibly it just gets disposed of in some toxic manner in another country. I think it's about time we attach a disposal fee or tax on all these things at the time of purchase. The product cycle on most electronics is rather short. It WILL be disposed of sometime and that interval gets to be less and less. "Out of sight, out of mind" doesn't get rid of the pollution, it just sends it to some other country. That other country is still on this earth though.
Why can't we just put in reasonable computer labs with Internet connections?
Location. If someone has to walk 3 miles to go to the nearest place with a computer lab, they aren't going to go that often. If they have a laptop close by, they are more apt to use it.
3.) Access to teachers in school (and tech support...).
Actually, I think that may be more of a negative than a positive for most kids. Most teachers are rather controlling with computers, most kids with their own computer could go more in depth with it. I don't know about anyone else, but generally on school computers I at least tried to do nothing more than what the teacher said, after all no use getting in trouble. But on my home PC I experimented with things, bootloaders, operating systems, drivers, system files, and really, it was because of this that I got interested in computers. If my only experience with computers was at school, I would have probably turned out to be one of those people who know nothing more than Windows, Word and Excel, who thinks to use HTML you must be some 1337 coder and PowerPoint usage makes you some computer wizard.
Really, the OLPC program was a success, not only in transforming the lives of thousands of kids in third world countries, but by making computers more affordable for the first world as well with the advent of the netbook.
Why can't we just put in reasonable computer labs with Internet connections?
Location. If someone has to walk 3 miles to go to the nearest place with a computer lab, they aren't going to go that often. If they have a laptop close by, they are more apt to use it.
3.) Access to teachers in school (and tech support...).
Actually, I think that may be more of a negative than a positive for most kids. Most teachers are rather controlling with computers, most kids with their own computer could go more in depth with it. I don't know about anyone else, but generally on school computers I at least tried to do nothing more than what the teacher said, after all no use getting in trouble. But on my home PC I experimented with things, bootloaders, operating systems, drivers, system files, and really, it was because of this that I got interested in computers. If my only experience with computers was at school, I would have probably turned out to be one of those people who know nothing more than Windows, Word and Excel, who thinks to use HTML you must be some 1337 coder and PowerPoint usage makes you some computer wizard.
Really, the OLPC program was a success, not only in transforming the lives of thousands of kids in third world countries, but by making computers more affordable for the first world as well with the advent of the netbook.
You make some good points. I guess let me elaborate my stance a bit. At THIS TIME, the OLPC may be jumping a bit far. We need to at least START OUT with reasonable computer labs for these kids to use. They need to become at least familiar with the basic concepts of computing before we give them laptops to take home and experiment with. You have to toss around one ball before you can juggle 3 or 4!
Personally, I started using computers when I was 5 yrs old, in Kindergarten. Our school had a lab full of Commodore 64s and Apple IIs. My parents had recently been given a Commodore 64 as a gift and they had no clue how to use it. I learned at least the basic steps on the Commodore and was able to build from there. Were they going to let me sit around and hack things in the school computer lab? No. But they gave me a good place to start and the computer lab instructors were rather resourceful and I felt I could always come to them for advice. One of them I even called up over the summer and she was more than glad to help me out!
That computer lab experience as a young child, coupled with the fact that my mom and dad couldn't figure out this new-f
It is nice that they want to make laptops for these kids but I think they are overdoing it. It seems like the proponents are more enthralled with the sizzle rather than the steak. Why can't we just put in reasonable computer labs with Internet connections?
I studied in Mexico for a while and it is quite common for many people, especially kids, to go to the neighborhood Internet cafe and pay a small fee to use their computers. There were always lots of kids there and they didn't mind that it was a "community" computer. While it would be nice to give everyone laptops, the whole idea of providing computing to masses of schoolchildren in the developing world needs to at least start with computer labs in the schools.
Fundamentally I see problems with giving kids in the developing world laptops:
1.) These are poor countries and the devices may be lost/stolen/sold to pay for essentials of life
2.) Not likely to have Internet access at home, may not even have reliable electricity
3.) Access to teachers in school (and tech support...).
I think they just wanted to make glitz and glamor out of this. The idea of a computer lab is not very sexy when compared to giving kids expensive pieces of hardware which will magically transform their lives.
Can't they build a lightning rod on top of the Capital? I remember a movie once where they did this, they were able to get at least 1.21GW out of it.
On a day like today, all of those things sound kinda fun!
If it lands in my backyard, I get to keep it. Just like the neighbor kid's frisbees and baseballs! That's only fair, right?
I guess on that token, regular landlines and electricity are luxuries too. I don't absolutely need a telephone to live, nor do I need electricity. All I really need are air, water and food. Air is generally here. Water, I guess I could go out to the well and pump it. Oh wait I don't have one of those. I pay the city to pump it for me and deliver it in the faucet. Food? I go to the store for that. But then I bring it home and it requires refrigeration which requires power. Just like the 1800's, right?
Schools are a bit different. Courts have ruled that schools essentially operate "in loco parentis", or "in the place of the parents" while class is in session. While cases have ruled "Constitutional rights do not necessarily end at the schoolhouse door," they are permitted to do things which are reasonable to ensure security to the school, like search bags.
>>It has apparently hung in a low orbit for months now.
>"Hung"? as in hanging from something? Or hung as in "windows hung on me"?
Ah that Hung guy. Wasn't he on American Idol? Could this have anything to do with it? Could his awful singing have broken the satellite?
So who works in telescopes?
Who is to say that my sister isn't a terrorist? She is sure meaner than one!
My Granny just turned 84 this week. Yes, she is losing it. That's what happens when you get to be that age. Well she is sort of losing it, not all. She does drive and cook. But she does not drive very much (I'd be surprised if it was more than 1000 mi/yr!) and the place she lives serves lunch and dinner. I try and keep an eye on her!
People who live in an area considered the "frozen hell" of this world are complaining about it finally warming up?
While this is a great product, I can see people like my granny going nuts over this. She can't handle the TV anymore (called me because it wouldn't work - I guess it has to be plugged in!), the telephone (has no idea how voicemail works, thinks that I am my answering machine). When lightbulbs exist that won't turn off, that might just be over the top.
At a job I had a long time ago (in a call center), the supervisor was ultra-paranoid about food and especially beverage around the computers. Turns out a few years ago, someone spilled no more than a spoonful of soup into the keyboard of a Wyse terminal. This somehow fried out the whole terminal, which then sent some kind of surge up the serial connection which then fried out the terminal server and a few other terminals connected to the same terminal server. Sounds ridiculous, I agree, but this wasn't the kind of guy who made exagerrated stories.