>something quite difficult in places these laptops are intended to go
They're not going to the moon. The two places I've read that theyre going are Brazil and Libya. I suggest you do some research before condemming those places as these stereotypical savage backwards lands. Libya GDP per capita is almost $12,000 dollars. Brazil is poorer at about $8,000 per year, but far from the stereotypical 3rd world you describe in your post. I'm sure there are many schools in Libya that put public schools in Chicago or New York to shame. Let's stop pretending varying degrees of wealth doesnt exist on the local level. The third world is hardly homogeneous.
I don't know if the OLPC project is going to be a success, but the economics of it is sound. It may just be another failed technological solution to a social problem, but the price-point is probably doable (or at least much cheaper than anything else on the market), the countries interested in the pilot program are wealthy enough to afford them, etc.
I think people dismiss the skinner box criticism because its all too real. As someone who hurt his grades in college over Muds its hard to deny that there isnt an addictive element here. Its really all about the levels, equipment, stature, and gold. The social aspect also stops the lonliness you would get if you were just, say, shooting hoops all alone.
You don't need a large body of academic knowledge to fess up to the skinner-box model of gaming. Its real.
Top-40 is popular and profitable but that doesnt mean that its any good.
The author makes some excellent points but theyre not exactly new. People have been asking for more dynamic content and world changes since the early days of mudding.
Personally, I dont think most players would want things to get too dynamic. The game is driven by predicatable and published actions to gain levels. I doubt many players will take too kindly to "You town has been invaded and destroyed. Here is a new map that isnt on thottbot. Half your stuff burned and they stole all your gold." There would be lawsuits. I'm sure some people would absolutely love that but they probably dont exist in numbers to keep up a mainstream game like warcraft running.
Blizzard has made a very nice skinner box and people inside skinner boxes tend to stay.
You can shutoff a computer just like you can shut-off a car. There's a power switch right on the front! And unlike televisions and DVD players and other more popular toys it shuts down completely.
When modern OS's have nothing to do they sent halt commands to the processor cutting down power consumption greatly. Default settings shut down the monitor in a few minutes when unused. CRTs use a significant amount of power.
A PC on idle is like a lightbulb left on. Where's the animosity towards the guy who leaves his porch light on all night or the city lighting streets when no one is around? Heck, do you really need a big screen tv or more than one computer? As you can see, energy saving is a touchy issue. The best strategy has always been education first and hard arm tactics last (like this proposal). The application of sane power settings is alraedy here. If you want to make a difference you should lobby to make incandescent bulbs illegal, leavign lights on illegal, using hotplates and space heaters illegal, hairdryers, etc. Those use many times the power a PC uses and can all be done without.
>Finally, Joe Sixpack finally gets DRM! The sooner the better, I say!
Joe and Jane Sixpack have been getting DRM since the opening of the iTunes store and they love it. The idea that the common person will stand up against copyright controls is a little naive. Heck, some of them are looking forward to rebuying their movies and music in the new formats.
More like it was (and remains) highly inefficient and would have used a large part of the spectrum. You could have wireless power to your home but you can kiss the cell phone, tv, radio, etc goodbye.
A great deal of Tesla's achievements are apocryphal. There is no real proof about claims of wireless power to motors miles away and other things people attribute to him. In reality he was a clever guy but not this victim of forward thinking/backwards government as his myth protrays him as.
Who doesnt like snotty hipsters who wear their consumerism on their sleeve?
Frankly, Apple's advertising needs to back off from the elitist crap and re-brand their machines as being for the everyman, but I wonder if they gave up on being a computer company long ago and now are a boutique electronics manufacturer for people willing to pay the extra 20-30%.
None of those things means failure = human death. Testing something that people fly in is a lot more complex than 'set the clock to midnight and see what happens.'
Its called conspiracy, people get arrested for it all the time and rightly so. If you arrest a guy with a gun and plans to rob a bank in a room surrounded by other guys with plans to rob that same bank, then perhaps they might be in on the same plan? Or the driver going to pick him up at said bank. Or the "brains" who planned it out. A jury ultimately decides. All this hyperbole and hand-wringing over this case is laughable. There are real abuses of the the international law enforcement systems (secret prisons, torture, etc), but this doesnt even rank in the bottom 10,000.
True story. I was having radiosurgery to remove a birthmark a couple of years ago. Essentially it burns off the skin in a way that allows it to heal with no scarring. I'm dosed up with Novocain and am lying down trying not think of whats going on a few inches from my eyes. Suddenly it smells like burning pork. I think to myself "What the hell is burning." A moment later I realized it was me.
Thats odd. Ive never seen a retailer not take a return and give a new copy to the buyer, assuming that the media is bad. Some stores will even give you store credit if you claim that you bought the game but your computer doesnt meet the minimum requirements to run it, although you'll have to really tear into customer service to get this sometimes.
Its a violation of a pretty neat little system. These things are free (or about as close you can get to it) so its not like its some propriety item they bought and are trying to get more features out of. They are defrauding a company for free wireless routers.
Maybe Im crazy but I think the FON system is very clever and if peope werent abusing it, it might take off interesting ways. Instead it "doodzz free wireless routers here!!!" Shame really.
>And Dear FCC, go after the advertisers who have used Zango to flog their wares. A few hundred thousand in fines here, and a few hundred thousand there, and the message will get out while you're reducing the government deficit in the process.
Oh that would be great. Companies would make advertisers sign ethical agreement. No more viral or guerilla marketing either. Ethics and advertising? I'm not holding my breath. Something tells me many companies (especially small web-based ones) like it this way.
Its not a dumb list its a conservative wish list. Toss banning of gay marriage on there and you have most of the gop platform. Shows you what cnet thinks of "technologists."
I've used more than my fair share of car fm transmitters and am completely blown away at how powerful these siruis/xm transmitters are. How the heck did they get past the FCC? These things will over-ride my legal transmitter from 3 or 4 car lengths away. NPR shouldnt be fighting (and paying for) this fight, the damn FCC should be doing its job. Hell, theres an open pirate radio station in Chicago that only plays Dragnet reruns. Theyve been around for months while everyone keeps writing complains to what looks like a useless FCC. Well, except if you show some breast or say a naughty word on TV. Then they spring into action.
Yep, its theater. As long as people believe the machine they are tied to can magically read their minds they will act accordingly. This puts stress on the subject. Standard interrogation techniques plus the polygraph leads to some surprisngly good results, if not very ethical all around. Supposedly, all lawyers advise to never take a polygraph because youre pretty much handing yourself over to a very stressful situation where you have little to no control and believe those in change know every little thing about you. If it didnt work so well with dumb criminals (and dumb juries) it would probably be illegal to use.
Not to mention, by default, windows firewall allows local segment traffic onto ports 135-139. So if the cracker wants to brute force the shares he doesnt even need to take down the firewall.
Thank you for your insightful post. Unlike the grandparent you understand that all medicine is flawed and that current methods have done a hell of a lot more good than bad. Its a pretty recent idea that mental illness is an illness (as opposed to 'he just needs a kick in the pants') and that people should be able to live a life full of positive aspects.
I do disagree about your disdain for the western system. For the most part its a class-free system which does rewards smarts and hard work. Im more than familiar with other parts oft he world where the son of someone high-up gets the only few avaialble decent jobs. At least here someone from a no-name family can do well in school, get an internship, get a good job, and have a decent standard of living. A nobody outranking his 'betters' is a new modern idea. The idea that women should also be able to do this is even newer. Outside the western world these ideas are usually frowned upon or may even get you jailed/killed for even suggesting them.
As far as intelligence being a curse, well, ignorance is bliss, but the world -needs- intelligent people. Think of the handful of smarties who have changed the course of human history for the better. Now think of all the unsung heroes who get things done on a more everyday level. There's a certain dignity to being intelligent and using it. Some people will never see this, but many will, and its nice to know that you are hard to replace and what you do can only be done by a small percentage of people. On top of it, I consider intelligence to be akin to owning a racecar while everyone owns a honda. Sure, it breaks down a lot, needs maintenance, doesnt quite fit the road well, but when you need that horsepower its there waiting for you.
Your comment about the cogntive dissonance and coping mechanisms may be true, but I've found that smart people would rather stop sweating it and either become apathetic to the things they cant change or choose to be agnostics. So, I dont feel that you have to engage in coping mechanisms and denial. Also, I believe its very important to tolerate coping mechanisms now that I know how difficult life is as an adult. I certainly do not give any leeway to fundamentalists, hateful people, but I dont consider those who have some spirituality in their lives to be enemies of rationalism. I don't stress out over incompetent goverment because I know that government will always be a mix of interests and capital and its naive to pretend that it can be ever made perfect. I dont stress out over religion as I know either there's nothing there or people will never get it right. Regardless, seeing the system as agaisnt as intellectuals is a victimizing mentality. Why not see it as having a minor gift and trying to use it the best you can? What about having some pride about yourself?
Your other advice about living with illness is spot-on.
There's no shortage of good academic reasons on why they dont but I dont believe it holds much water in the real world. Even a simple cipher would stop 'casual hackers' with physical access to your machine like bosses, coworkers, roommates, etc. Right now all you have to do is search for accounts.xml and off you go. If you know the path then you can get it in seconds.
Gaim also refuses to encrypt communications (like trillian and skype do) because without some kind of trusted key exchange to verify the other party's identity they claim its useless. I'd rather be able to stop causal snoops than not have any encryption. At the end of the day its a philosophy thing for the most part. Thankfully there are other multi-IM clients out there. I dont like too much philosophy with my software. Reminds me too much of being called 'rude' because I had non world readable files on my shell account way back when.
I dont see how even those two policies make sense. They're saying windows is so insecure why bother with some simple encryption. On the other hand if the OS is so insecure I can grab your private key and password and off I go impersonating you on whatever trusted key encryption scheme they decide to use, if they ever do (which I doubt will happen any time soon if ever).
I dont like this perfectionist attitude because casual users have absolutely no idea whats going on and are most at risk for sniffing and password stealing. You'd think there would be basic protections here. Lastly, there is nothing stopping them from putting in simpler weaker protections until a better system is found/implemented.
On the plus side there are some encryption plugins and its free.
As someone who is used to 20+ tabs at one time, I disagree. The new tab limitation is a pretty lousy UI change. Its like Mozilla and MS are trying to outcrap each other in the UI department. At 1024x768 I get 10 tabs. Now I have to scroll tabs (!) or use the tab selector (ugly hack) to see the rest. I know there's a config item I can change to restore 1.5 like behavoir but I shouldnt have to do this in a browser that advertises the advantages of tabs. The old system worked fine: tabs would dynamically shrink as you add more. If a user wants to have nice big tabs they know not to open more than 8 or so. Those who dont need to be reminded that the green slashdot favicon is actually Slashdot.org could open 20-30 tabs. I paid for this RAM and I like using it. Now everyone gets big tabs no matter what.
Slashdot Mirror
>something quite difficult in places these laptops are intended to go
They're not going to the moon. The two places I've read that theyre going are Brazil and Libya. I suggest you do some research before condemming those places as these stereotypical savage backwards lands. Libya GDP per capita is almost $12,000 dollars. Brazil is poorer at about $8,000 per year, but far from the stereotypical 3rd world you describe in your post. I'm sure there are many schools in Libya that put public schools in Chicago or New York to shame. Let's stop pretending varying degrees of wealth doesnt exist on the local level. The third world is hardly homogeneous.
I don't know if the OLPC project is going to be a success, but the economics of it is sound. It may just be another failed technological solution to a social problem, but the price-point is probably doable (or at least much cheaper than anything else on the market), the countries interested in the pilot program are wealthy enough to afford them, etc.
>considered one of if not the most heavily armored tanks in service.
They used russian-made/sold Kornets. I dont think theres any armor out there that can withstand a hit from those. Armor's not the problem its tactics.
I think people dismiss the skinner box criticism because its all too real. As someone who hurt his grades in college over Muds its hard to deny that there isnt an addictive element here. Its really all about the levels, equipment, stature, and gold. The social aspect also stops the lonliness you would get if you were just, say, shooting hoops all alone.
You don't need a large body of academic knowledge to fess up to the skinner-box model of gaming. Its real.
Top-40 is popular and profitable but that doesnt mean that its any good.
The author makes some excellent points but theyre not exactly new. People have been asking for more dynamic content and world changes since the early days of mudding.
Personally, I dont think most players would want things to get too dynamic. The game is driven by predicatable and published actions to gain levels. I doubt many players will take too kindly to "You town has been invaded and destroyed. Here is a new map that isnt on thottbot. Half your stuff burned and they stole all your gold." There would be lawsuits. I'm sure some people would absolutely love that but they probably dont exist in numbers to keep up a mainstream game like warcraft running.
Blizzard has made a very nice skinner box and people inside skinner boxes tend to stay.
You can shutoff a computer just like you can shut-off a car. There's a power switch right on the front! And unlike televisions and DVD players and other more popular toys it shuts down completely.
When modern OS's have nothing to do they sent halt commands to the processor cutting down power consumption greatly. Default settings shut down the monitor in a few minutes when unused. CRTs use a significant amount of power.
A PC on idle is like a lightbulb left on. Where's the animosity towards the guy who leaves his porch light on all night or the city lighting streets when no one is around? Heck, do you really need a big screen tv or more than one computer? As you can see, energy saving is a touchy issue. The best strategy has always been education first and hard arm tactics last (like this proposal). The application of sane power settings is alraedy here. If you want to make a difference you should lobby to make incandescent bulbs illegal, leavign lights on illegal, using hotplates and space heaters illegal, hairdryers, etc. Those use many times the power a PC uses and can all be done without.
>Finally, Joe Sixpack finally gets DRM! The sooner the better, I say!
Joe and Jane Sixpack have been getting DRM since the opening of the iTunes store and they love it. The idea that the common person will stand up against copyright controls is a little naive. Heck, some of them are looking forward to rebuying their movies and music in the new formats.
Hey guys, I dont like Alan Keyes either but thats a low blow.
More like it was (and remains) highly inefficient and would have used a large part of the spectrum. You could have wireless power to your home but you can kiss the cell phone, tv, radio, etc goodbye.
A great deal of Tesla's achievements are apocryphal. There is no real proof about claims of wireless power to motors miles away and other things people attribute to him. In reality he was a clever guy but not this victim of forward thinking/backwards government as his myth protrays him as.
Who doesnt like snotty hipsters who wear their consumerism on their sleeve?
Frankly, Apple's advertising needs to back off from the elitist crap and re-brand their machines as being for the everyman, but I wonder if they gave up on being a computer company long ago and now are a boutique electronics manufacturer for people willing to pay the extra 20-30%.
None of those things means failure = human death. Testing something that people fly in is a lot more complex than 'set the clock to midnight and see what happens.'
Its called conspiracy, people get arrested for it all the time and rightly so. If you arrest a guy with a gun and plans to rob a bank in a room surrounded by other guys with plans to rob that same bank, then perhaps they might be in on the same plan? Or the driver going to pick him up at said bank. Or the "brains" who planned it out. A jury ultimately decides. All this hyperbole and hand-wringing over this case is laughable. There are real abuses of the the international law enforcement systems (secret prisons, torture, etc), but this doesnt even rank in the bottom 10,000.
True story. I was having radiosurgery to remove a birthmark a couple of years ago. Essentially it burns off the skin in a way that allows it to heal with no scarring. I'm dosed up with Novocain and am lying down trying not think of whats going on a few inches from my eyes. Suddenly it smells like burning pork. I think to myself "What the hell is burning." A moment later I realized it was me.
>but you are unoptimizing the situation for everyone else.
Considering these guys are going to flip these things on ebay, I seriously doubt they care.
Thats odd. Ive never seen a retailer not take a return and give a new copy to the buyer, assuming that the media is bad. Some stores will even give you store credit if you claim that you bought the game but your computer doesnt meet the minimum requirements to run it, although you'll have to really tear into customer service to get this sometimes.
Then again we are talking about Walmart...
Its a violation of a pretty neat little system. These things are free (or about as close you can get to it) so its not like its some propriety item they bought and are trying to get more features out of. They are defrauding a company for free wireless routers.
Maybe Im crazy but I think the FON system is very clever and if peope werent abusing it, it might take off interesting ways. Instead it "doodzz free wireless routers here!!!" Shame really.
>And Dear FCC, go after the advertisers who have used Zango to flog their wares. A few hundred thousand in fines here, and a few hundred thousand there, and the message will get out while you're reducing the government deficit in the process.
Oh that would be great. Companies would make advertisers sign ethical agreement. No more viral or guerilla marketing either. Ethics and advertising? I'm not holding my breath. Something tells me many companies (especially small web-based ones) like it this way.
Its not a dumb list its a conservative wish list. Toss banning of gay marriage on there and you have most of the gop platform. Shows you what cnet thinks of "technologists."
I've used more than my fair share of car fm transmitters and am completely blown away at how powerful these siruis/xm transmitters are. How the heck did they get past the FCC? These things will over-ride my legal transmitter from 3 or 4 car lengths away. NPR shouldnt be fighting (and paying for) this fight, the damn FCC should be doing its job. Hell, theres an open pirate radio station in Chicago that only plays Dragnet reruns. Theyve been around for months while everyone keeps writing complains to what looks like a useless FCC. Well, except if you show some breast or say a naughty word on TV. Then they spring into action.
Yep, its theater. As long as people believe the machine they are tied to can magically read their minds they will act accordingly. This puts stress on the subject. Standard interrogation techniques plus the polygraph leads to some surprisngly good results, if not very ethical all around. Supposedly, all lawyers advise to never take a polygraph because youre pretty much handing yourself over to a very stressful situation where you have little to no control and believe those in change know every little thing about you. If it didnt work so well with dumb criminals (and dumb juries) it would probably be illegal to use.
Not to mention, by default, windows firewall allows local segment traffic onto ports 135-139. So if the cracker wants to brute force the shares he doesnt even need to take down the firewall.
Thank you for your insightful post. Unlike the grandparent you understand that all medicine is flawed and that current methods have done a hell of a lot more good than bad. Its a pretty recent idea that mental illness is an illness (as opposed to 'he just needs a kick in the pants') and that people should be able to live a life full of positive aspects.
I do disagree about your disdain for the western system. For the most part its a class-free system which does rewards smarts and hard work. Im more than familiar with other parts oft he world where the son of someone high-up gets the only few avaialble decent jobs. At least here someone from a no-name family can do well in school, get an internship, get a good job, and have a decent standard of living. A nobody outranking his 'betters' is a new modern idea. The idea that women should also be able to do this is even newer. Outside the western world these ideas are usually frowned upon or may even get you jailed/killed for even suggesting them.
As far as intelligence being a curse, well, ignorance is bliss, but the world -needs- intelligent people. Think of the handful of smarties who have changed the course of human history for the better. Now think of all the unsung heroes who get things done on a more everyday level. There's a certain dignity to being intelligent and using it. Some people will never see this, but many will, and its nice to know that you are hard to replace and what you do can only be done by a small percentage of people. On top of it, I consider intelligence to be akin to owning a racecar while everyone owns a honda. Sure, it breaks down a lot, needs maintenance, doesnt quite fit the road well, but when you need that horsepower its there waiting for you.
Your comment about the cogntive dissonance and coping mechanisms may be true, but I've found that smart people would rather stop sweating it and either become apathetic to the things they cant change or choose to be agnostics. So, I dont feel that you have to engage in coping mechanisms and denial. Also, I believe its very important to tolerate coping mechanisms now that I know how difficult life is as an adult. I certainly do not give any leeway to fundamentalists, hateful people, but I dont consider those who have some spirituality in their lives to be enemies of rationalism. I don't stress out over incompetent goverment because I know that government will always be a mix of interests and capital and its naive to pretend that it can be ever made perfect. I dont stress out over religion as I know either there's nothing there or people will never get it right. Regardless, seeing the system as agaisnt as intellectuals is a victimizing mentality. Why not see it as having a minor gift and trying to use it the best you can? What about having some pride about yourself?
Your other advice about living with illness is spot-on.
Not to mention whatever "Total Control" is. I think he meant Total Recorder.
There's no shortage of good academic reasons on why they dont but I dont believe it holds much water in the real world. Even a simple cipher would stop 'casual hackers' with physical access to your machine like bosses, coworkers, roommates, etc. Right now all you have to do is search for accounts.xml and off you go. If you know the path then you can get it in seconds.
Gaim also refuses to encrypt communications (like trillian and skype do) because without some kind of trusted key exchange to verify the other party's identity they claim its useless. I'd rather be able to stop causal snoops than not have any encryption. At the end of the day its a philosophy thing for the most part. Thankfully there are other multi-IM clients out there. I dont like too much philosophy with my software. Reminds me too much of being called 'rude' because I had non world readable files on my shell account way back when.
I dont see how even those two policies make sense. They're saying windows is so insecure why bother with some simple encryption. On the other hand if the OS is so insecure I can grab your private key and password and off I go impersonating you on whatever trusted key encryption scheme they decide to use, if they ever do (which I doubt will happen any time soon if ever).
I dont like this perfectionist attitude because casual users have absolutely no idea whats going on and are most at risk for sniffing and password stealing. You'd think there would be basic protections here. Lastly, there is nothing stopping them from putting in simpler weaker protections until a better system is found/implemented.
On the plus side there are some encryption plugins and its free.
Nonsense. That's what they said about flying cars! Now they're everywhere.
>The latest version is quite nice.
As someone who is used to 20+ tabs at one time, I disagree. The new tab limitation is a pretty lousy UI change. Its like Mozilla and MS are trying to outcrap each other in the UI department. At 1024x768 I get 10 tabs. Now I have to scroll tabs (!) or use the tab selector (ugly hack) to see the rest. I know there's a config item I can change to restore 1.5 like behavoir but I shouldnt have to do this in a browser that advertises the advantages of tabs. The old system worked fine: tabs would dynamically shrink as you add more. If a user wants to have nice big tabs they know not to open more than 8 or so. Those who dont need to be reminded that the green slashdot favicon is actually Slashdot.org could open 20-30 tabs. I paid for this RAM and I like using it. Now everyone gets big tabs no matter what.
Also, why are extensions called "add-ons" now?