Until I started collecting more information about consequences of the project I was unsuspecting (call it naive). But I have changed my mind, not because of 'the food and water' argument, but for (the lack of) logistics. Probably a naive Negroponte was used to be able to write off R&D cost and to more easily get marketing intelligence.
I generally disagree that our voting system is in need of a major change.
Probably because you are lucky to live where you are, though there is room for a discussion [PDF] (Yes, I read though it, though not all). I may add that my bias towards CA is that things are not as fucked up there as in many other places.
I am also willing to bet that making the voter work harder is likely to drive down participation, which would skew the results in unpredictable ways.
I really doubt you'd ever get the political parties fixed before you would the voting system.
It's a bit of a hen/egg problem, even if you broaden the scope and call for a change of values.
I'll argue that the quality of what the government does (or the fact it isn't doing as much) is when either the congress and presidency is in opposition.
Here (Germany) things work better if there is a strong opposition, basically the same principle. Unluckily, with a coalition of the two major parties in place, there is (almost) none.
The only real good solution is to set up the system so that there is always an opposition or some sort of road block and consolation of the people who did not win the election.
Over here, the assembly of representatives of the 'federal states' to some extent serves this purpose (btw, these representatives are determined by the federate states much like you suggest for the US).
If you have ever studied US history
Not really, but information adds up continously. Besides, I think that the presidential 'one man show' is only for the media, so probably doing away with a president would be a good idea. Your proposed voting system is poisoned by unfairness if you put overvotes in the bin.
However, there might be better ways to reform the US government, but currently I think its quite broke
Rest assured, it is not the only one, and it goes back to norms and values (see above, full circle).
TFA: "If I can sell 1.5 million computers in Iraq, Afghanistan and Ethiopia, I will feel a lot better than other sales we might make."
It seems that there is no need to characterize the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ethiopia might not be so much in focus, thus it might be interesting to give a quote: "The United States has quietly poured weapons and military advisers into Ethiopia, whose recent invasion of Somalia opened a new front in the Bush administration's war on terrorism.
A Christian-led nation in sub-Saharan Africa, surrounded almost entirely by Muslim states, Ethiopia has received nearly $20 million in U.S. military aid since late 2002. That's more than any country in the region except Djibouti.
Last month, thousands of Ethiopian troops invaded neighboring Somalia and helped overturn a fundamentalist Islamic government that the Bush administration said was supported by al-Qaeda.
The U.S. and Ethiopian militaries have "a close working relationship," Pentagon spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Joe Carpenter said. The ties include intelligence sharing, arms aid and training that gives the Ethiopians "the capacity to defend their borders and intercept terrorists and weapons of mass destruction," he said." (emphasis mine)
Am I the only one who feels that there is something strange about exactly this selection of countries as an intial target market?
... 'Western style voting', while 'proportional voting' seems to have a stronghold in Europe.
Yet, though I agree that plurality as well as proportional systems from party lists need improvement or a change, I do not see how this is to fix major problems.
My position is that until there is no improvement regarding political ethics you will end up with the same quality of political discussion/decision making that you have today. In short, you have to create a proper set of choices first.
Which implies that something that deserves the attribute 'perfect' does exist, which I doubt. Thus I would rather opt for 'Good practice gives you a chance to improve'.
After, they can overlay their swing with that of the Club Pro or another golfer and see exactly what they are doing wrong.
Though I apply a similar feedback-technique in order to improve (not for golf, but that is not relevant), I doubt (and I am also told so) that this is very effective, as it introduces (too much) thinking, which is too slow when you actually perform. The trick seems to immediately perceive 'what is' and then let the machine do 'what is right' intuitively. The conclusion is that you have to practice the same sequences over and over again in order to improve while never getting 'perfect'. On a side note, this also seems to imply that storage/memory modes for tasks involving body movement need to be much more distributed and 'localized',
"Thomas J. Watson coined the motto Think while managing the sales and advertising departments at the National Cash Register Company, saying "Thought has been the father of every advance since time began. 'I didn't think' has cost the world millions of dollars." In 1914 he brought the motto with him to CTR, which later became IBM." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Think
You can train yourself to remember more dreams, and to have as much control as desired.
Agreed, there was even an approach to exploit daydreaming for learning purposes (which resulted in a book in 1989 which I then read but unluckily missed to follow up on), quote:
Daydreamer is a computer model of the stream of thought I developed at UCLA from 1983 to 1988. It implements the following:
* daydreaming goals: strategies for what to think about * emotional control of thought: triggering and direction of processing by emotions * hierarchical planning: achieving a goal by breaking it down into subgoals * analogical planning (chunking): storing successful plans and adapting them to future problems * episode indexing and retrieval: mechanisms for indexing and retrieval of cases * serendipity detection and application: a mechanism for recognizing and exploiting accidental relationships among problems * action mutation: a strategy for generating new possibilities when the system is stuck
Apart from hypothesizing that dreaming trains 'the neural' net one could also assume that it clears a pathway to intuition (defined as immediate perception without bothering to think, probably hinted to in your last statement).
I think one room was where they strapped a black box to your head and either zapped you with RF or Placebo, and the other room had a bed and an EEG for the sleep testing.
TFA[PDF]: "The exposure laboratory consisted of two separate rooms. In each room, the respective exposure area was shielded with screens, covered with absorbing material.... After completed exposure the subjects were EEG (electroencephalogram) recorded as they slept in a sleep laboratory."
So much for thinking. Now, what about concluding...
– funneling money into security organizations, thus ensuring that there is a proper infrastructure to be put in place once too many US-citizens should decide to be fed up with the feds
– providing a testbed for said organizations
– ensuring that the US will not come under (economic) pressure from a democratic China
Empirical evidence shows that this does lead to even worse a situation. Do not cars have a basically identical configuration of their PUI (Physically Usable Instrumentation), but still do people seem to be unaware of how to steer them properly, avoiding crashes that sometimes brick the vehicles and freeze their users to death, especially in winter time when one should expect everything to run extra smooth?
People put substantial monetary value on all kinds of things which have little actual utility. If this is crazy, it's a type of insanity which afflicts a large proportion (perhaps a majority) of the human race.
Decide for yourself:, quote: "Mental disorders are common in the United States and internationally. An estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older -- about one in four adults -- suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year. When applied to the 2004 U.S. Census residential population estimate for ages 18 and older, this figure translates to 57.7 million people. Even though mental disorders are widespread in the population, the main burden of illness is concentrated in a much smaller proportion -- about 6 percent, or 1 in 17 -- who suffer from a serious mental illness. In addition, mental disorders are the leading cause of disability in the U.S. and Canada for ages 15-44. Many people suffer from more than one mental disorder at a given time. Nearly half (45 percent) of those with any mental disorder meet criteria for 2 or more disorders, with severity strongly related to comorbidity."
More the lack of knowledge, or at least the application of it.
Some causes:
– unnecessary time pressure at 'lower levels' due to lack of planning capabilities at 'higher levels'
– general focus on speed (seen as reduction of cost) rather than quality
– expulsion of elderly above 35 from processes, thereby loosing on 'corporate knowledge'
– focus on specialised training, view of general education as a burden and a waste of time
As the more pragmatically thinking overlords already have realized that this, in the end, is not a feasible option, they have started to install (a worldwide) system of total surveillance which in a later stage can easily be augmented to block individuals from not behaving according to set norms.
Not stating what type of equipment one uses for comparisons/ratings of audio experiences does not help to cure the condition.
However, one thing I'm sure of is that if a CD copy of an analog recording is better than an analog copy of the same recording you cannot say digital sound is inferior. And if an mp3 copy of a CD containing music originally recorded in analog format sounds better than an LP of exactly the same recording, you cannot say mp3 has intrinsic fidelity problems.
Yes, the wonderful world of digital processing adds information to the source (and be it only DRM) and this way enhances fidelity.
If I look from here (Europe), that is much the same as if I look at the entire US-population (Quote: "While the Wal-Mart banner has 83% of total U.S. household penetration,...).
Slashdot Mirror
Hopefully OLPC will survive.
Until I started collecting more information about consequences of the project I was unsuspecting (call it naive). But I have changed my mind, not because of 'the food and water' argument, but for (the lack of) logistics. Probably a naive Negroponte was used to be able to write off R&D cost and to more easily get marketing intelligence.
Thank you for the input.
CC.
I generally disagree that our voting system is in need of a major change.
Probably because you are lucky to live where you are, though there is room for a discussion [PDF] (Yes, I read though it, though not all). I may add that my bias towards CA is that things are not as fucked up there as in many other places.
I am also willing to bet that making the voter work harder is likely to drive down participation, which would skew the results in unpredictable ways.
I agree, thus no betting.
CC.
I really doubt you'd ever get the political parties fixed before you would the voting system.
It's a bit of a hen/egg problem, even if you broaden the scope and call for a change of values.
I'll argue that the quality of what the government does (or the fact it isn't doing as much) is when either the congress and presidency is in opposition.
Here (Germany) things work better if there is a strong opposition, basically the same principle. Unluckily, with a coalition of the two major parties in place, there is (almost) none.
The only real good solution is to set up the system so that there is always an opposition or some sort of road block and consolation of the people who did not win the election.
Over here, the assembly of representatives of the 'federal states' to some extent serves this purpose (btw, these representatives are determined by the federate states much like you suggest for the US).
If you have ever studied US history
Not really, but information adds up continously. Besides, I think that the presidential 'one man show' is only for the media, so probably doing away with a president would be a good idea. Your proposed voting system is poisoned by unfairness if you put overvotes in the bin.
However, there might be better ways to reform the US government, but currently I think its quite broke
Rest assured, it is not the only one, and it goes back to norms and values (see above, full circle).
CC.
TFA: "If I can sell 1.5 million computers in Iraq, Afghanistan and Ethiopia, I will feel a lot better than other sales we might make."
It seems that there is no need to characterize the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ethiopia might not be so much in focus, thus it might be interesting to give a quote: "The United States has quietly poured weapons and military advisers into Ethiopia, whose recent invasion of Somalia opened a new front in the Bush administration's war on terrorism.
A Christian-led nation in sub-Saharan Africa, surrounded almost entirely by Muslim states, Ethiopia has received nearly $20 million in U.S. military aid since late 2002. That's more than any country in the region except Djibouti.
Last month, thousands of Ethiopian troops invaded neighboring Somalia and helped overturn a fundamentalist Islamic government that the Bush administration said was supported by al-Qaeda.
The U.S. and Ethiopian militaries have "a close working relationship," Pentagon spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Joe Carpenter said. The ties include intelligence sharing, arms aid and training that gives the Ethiopians "the capacity to defend their borders and intercept terrorists and weapons of mass destruction," he said." (emphasis mine)
Am I the only one who feels that there is something strange about exactly this selection of countries as an intial target market?
CC.
... 'Western style voting', while 'proportional voting' seems to have a stronghold in Europe.
Yet, though I agree that plurality as well as proportional systems from party lists need improvement or a change, I do not see how this is to fix major problems.
My position is that until there is no improvement regarding political ethics you will end up with the same quality of political discussion/decision making that you have today. In short, you have to create a proper set of choices first.
CC.
invalidates them from having a higher meaning
:) that I am in the process of approaching the still distant target to have a grasp of Taoism (for short: Taoist agnostic).
Why is there a need for the attribution 'higher'? I am working from the premise that 'meaning' is a transitory phenomenon.
impossibility in rationalizing the two
Here I am troubled with the term 'rationalizing' – integrating? as parts of a whole?
I'm a philosophical Taoist mathematician
Well, I am in good faith
CC.
... now that everyone has his data stored away the project is obsolete anyway.
For an insightful view of the project from India I may refer to 'OLPC -- Rest in Peace', already written July 2006. 'Formula for Milking the Digital Divide' might also be interesting.
Disclaimer.
CC.
The EU is in some ways a trade agreement anyway.
Some might argue that it is the bureaucrats ultimate conspiracy to abolish democracy.
CC.
Perfect practice makes perfect.
Which implies that something that deserves the attribute 'perfect' does exist, which I doubt. Thus I would rather opt for 'Good practice gives you a chance to improve'.
After, they can overlay their swing with that of the Club Pro or another golfer and see exactly what they are doing wrong.
Though I apply a similar feedback-technique in order to improve (not for golf, but that is not relevant), I doubt (and I am also told so) that this is very effective, as it introduces (too much) thinking, which is too slow when you actually perform. The trick seems to immediately perceive 'what is' and then let the machine do 'what is right' intuitively. The conclusion is that you have to practice the same sequences over and over again in order to improve while never getting 'perfect'. On a side note, this also seems to imply that storage/memory modes for tasks involving body movement need to be much more distributed and 'localized',
CC.
the scientist will retool the experiment around a different hypothesis
More like 'transform the data to make it fit to the hypothesis', not only for mundane reasons like timelines, general pressure etc. .
For a broader scope, read KUHN, 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'.
CC.
Think does come from
"Thomas J. Watson coined the motto Think while managing the sales and advertising departments at the National Cash Register Company, saying "Thought has been the father of every advance since time began. 'I didn't think' has cost the world millions of dollars." In 1914 he brought the motto with him to CTR, which later became IBM." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Think
Think about it, it seems obvious.
CC.
Why is that comma there?
Everything gets smaller, brains included.
CC.
Agreed, there was even an approach to exploit daydreaming for learning purposes (which resulted in a book in 1989 which I then read but unluckily missed to follow up on), quote:
Apart from hypothesizing that dreaming trains 'the neural' net one could also assume that it clears a pathway to intuition (defined as immediate perception without bothering to think, probably hinted to in your last statement).
CC.
Interestingly, televisions without inbuilt digital decoding are still on the market today - though I can't think why.
Because cable transmission is still mostly analogue, like in Germany for instance.
CC.
I think one room was where they strapped a black box to your head and either zapped you with RF or Placebo, and the other room had a bed and an EEG for the sleep testing.
... After completed exposure the subjects were EEG (electroencephalogram) recorded as they slept in a sleep laboratory."
...
TFA[PDF]: "The exposure laboratory consisted of two separate rooms. In each room, the respective exposure area was shielded with screens, covered with absorbing material.
So much for thinking. Now, what about concluding
CC.
– funneling money into security organizations, thus ensuring that there is a proper infrastructure to be put in place once too many US-citizens should decide to be fed up with the feds
– providing a testbed for said organizations
– ensuring that the US will not come under (economic) pressure from a democratic China
Business as usual.
CC.
If there was at least a baseline common platform
Empirical evidence shows that this does lead to even worse a situation. Do not cars have a basically identical configuration of their PUI (Physically Usable Instrumentation), but still do people seem to be unaware of how to steer them properly, avoiding crashes that sometimes brick the vehicles and freeze their users to death, especially in winter time when one should expect everything to run extra smooth?
CC.
People put substantial monetary value on all kinds of things which have little actual utility. If this is crazy, it's a type of insanity which afflicts a large proportion (perhaps a majority) of the human race.
Decide for yourself:, quote: "Mental disorders are common in the United States and internationally. An estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older -- about one in four adults -- suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year. When applied to the 2004 U.S. Census residential population estimate for ages 18 and older, this figure translates to 57.7 million people. Even though mental disorders are widespread in the population, the main burden of illness is concentrated in a much smaller proportion -- about 6 percent, or 1 in 17 -- who suffer from a serious mental illness. In addition, mental disorders are the leading cause of disability in the U.S. and Canada for ages 15-44. Many people suffer from more than one mental disorder at a given time. Nearly half (45 percent) of those with any mental disorder meet criteria for 2 or more disorders, with severity strongly related to comorbidity."
CC.
More the lack of knowledge, or at least the application of it.
Some causes:
– unnecessary time pressure at 'lower levels' due to lack of planning capabilities at 'higher levels'
– general focus on speed (seen as reduction of cost) rather than quality
– expulsion of elderly above 35 from processes, thereby loosing on 'corporate knowledge'
– focus on specialised training, view of general education as a burden and a waste of time
CC.
Why is it so wrong for someone to be so into Star Trek that they might actually experience negative physical effects from such an ordeal?
Ask a psychiatrist, if none is available, a psychologist would be fine as well.
CC.
As the more pragmatically thinking overlords already have realized that this, in the end, is not a feasible option, they have started to install (a worldwide) system of total surveillance which in a later stage can easily be augmented to block individuals from not behaving according to set norms.
CC.
How about vinyl read by laser?
You for sure refer to the ELP Laser Turntable.
Then replace vinyl by a durable medium, presumably involving some nanocomposite coating (and of course you could physically reformat the thing).
CC.
Double blind testing shows no perceptible difference between a good MP3 and the source material for most listeners most of the time
Which, as far as my understanding goes, gives evidence of a difference. Besides, good practice to enhance fidelity is to quote a source.
CC.
ill informed people
Not stating what type of equipment one uses for comparisons/ratings of audio experiences does not help to cure the condition.
However, one thing I'm sure of is that if a CD copy of an analog recording is better than an analog copy of the same recording you cannot say digital sound is inferior. And if an mp3 copy of a CD containing music originally recorded in analog format sounds better than an LP of exactly the same recording, you cannot say mp3 has intrinsic fidelity problems.
Yes, the wonderful world of digital processing adds information to the source (and be it only DRM) and this way enhances fidelity.
CC.
Look at the general population at wal-mart
...).
If I look from here (Europe), that is much the same as if I look at the entire US-population (Quote: "While the Wal-Mart banner has 83% of total U.S. household penetration,
CC.