The usual disclaimer: I will not read a Dvorak column, so I am ass-u-ming here that if he does bring up this point, he does so so cursorily that you did not think it worth mentioning.
The financial justification for the OLPC is NOT OLPC vs rice, but OLPC vs printed textbooks. The OLPC is financed by replacing printed textbooks.
You lose heavy, out of date, hand me down textbooks which are almost certainly in some foreign language, expensive to obtain, expensive to distribute.
You gain up to date digital textbooks in the native language, all of which can be easily carried at once, which are easily distributed, and whose cost is limited to the initial production and translation only.
There is another point which Dvorak has backwards. Which is more insulting to a third worlder, to give him rice which destroys his own agriculture and tells him he is too stupid to learn, or to give him textbooks which he cannot produce on his own and which give him hope for the future? Dvorak seems to think it is better to keep the third world ignorant and dependent on foreigners for food, rather than have them learn and stand on their own legs become competitors. That is the true insult.
Okay genius, explain to me how many radars you would mount and where. Consider that the closest ANY plane has to full coverage is the AWACS, and they don't have coverage above or below except at a sufficient distance for the cone of coverage to reach the ground.
Remember, each radar sends out beams. Whether from a dish or electronically steered, they still send out beams. They don't fill the surrounding space with some kind of field that magically reports back disturbances in the force. They send out beams and read reflections. Like you with a flashlight and telescope.
Explain why lacking a pilot suddenly makes it feasible.
The military spends squillions of dollars on this stuff, and still don't have it. Are you that much better?
"Whoever" was Netflix, and I think they and their millions of mailers are more knowledgeable about their operations than you and your 60,000 mailers at a different company in a different situation.
Instead of just parroting somebody, as if that is great satire from an intellectual mind, why don't you actually do some work there and type in a few real rebuttals?
You know, something like this:
Copyright law is a great evil in society
No, Disney invested a lot of money in Steamboat Willie and deserves to have it protected until the end of time. The idea that anyone should be able to steal somebody else's idea is communist and anarchist. Why, what would have happened if anyone could steal anyone else's great works, like Buster Keaton or Rudyard Kipling?
Windows is actively damaging to a child's education
You don't want to teach children how to think for themselves. That makes for terrible consumers. Better to wait until they have grown up and shown responsibility before lettnig them learn how to think independently and work out puzzles on their own.
Windows encourages a poor mental model of computation...from its... "priacy is bad"...
Of course piracy is bad! The MPAA and RIAA have put a lot of work into creating laws for us to follow (see the second point above) and it is their prerogative to make us pay for every time we listen to anything and to pay for singing Happy Birthday -- you didn't write it, why should you get to sing somebody else's hard work for free? What makes you think you should be able to pay once and listen to something on several different devices or at different times? Next thing you know, people will consider it their right to play music on a stereo that multipel people can listen to at once without individual headphone-enabled properly paid for copies.
No, Netflix said they are paying a rate that entitles them to have the post office pick up their mailers, but Netflix delivers them anyway. That is the $100M cost savings. Netflix says they are either paying too much or the post office is saving by not doing work they are paid for.
Why did you assume you knew what I wrote, no matter how unclear it was, when you could have paused for a couple of seconds and thought that if it seemed so obviously wrong, maybe you misunderstood it?
How often do you mod? It would explain a lot of bizarre mods.
Are you one of those morons who see the word "radar" and think it magically sees everything around it?
Radar is like using a flashlight and a telescope to see around you. It has to be aimed at each position. The farther away you want to see, the more powerful flashlight and telescope you need, and the longer it takes to build up an idea of what is out there. Plus it is pretty dang tricky to look behind you. AWACS planes with those huge circular radars on top have trouble looking straight up or down. Radar in typical airliners only looks in a cone faced forward and won't detect that plane below you which is rising as you are descending, or to the side coming in your direction.
The OLPC is premised on the fact that it replaces expensive hand me down textbooks with digital info. Right now, most third world textbooks are hand me downs from other countries, likely not in their native language, out of date, and beaten up.
The OLPC has digital textbooks. Not only can all textbooks be carried back and forth on that five mile walk between home and school, but the only hurdle to being up to date and in the native language is the initial writing, not the cost of printing and the cost of distributing.
This is a HUGE gain financially, and having the possibility of up to date books in the native language is beyond a price comparison.
The OLPC is a win even if you ignore the advantage of inquisitive minds exploring far beyond what is in textbooks.
Netflix also said they pay for pickup service even tho they deliver their shipments to the post office, at an estimated $100M savings to the post office. They could either demand the post office pick up as they are paid to do, or charge less for what they don't do.
Either way, this is nothing but a conflict of interest from that so-called analyst. I wonder if the SEC will investigate him for this.
if the judge was making decisions regarding the credibility of witnesses he was exceeding his authority in the summary judgment phase
No, the judge is allowed and probably required to throw out witnesses who have no direct knowledge, who are not experts in what they claim to be expert in, who try to introduce new subjects into testimony on old subjects, etc etc etc. That is what the judge did, and the fact that that illegal evidence was all that SCO could muster for their claims is what got the claims thrown out. When there are no material facts for a jury, there is no need for a jury.
If this decision was incorrect--it looks like it was--
It only looks like it was to the columnist shill. Anyone who has followed groklaw for lo these many years knows otherwise. SCO's evidence was invalid for many reasons, which is why there are no material facts for a jury to evaluate.
PJ has made it abundantly clear that what the judge threw out was not claims, but evidence. Too bad for SCO that the only evidence for most of their claims was invalid. PJ also made that really clear, that the evidence was thrown out because it came from people who were not qualified, by the legal rules of evidence, to make those claims, or it was beyond deadlines, or any number of reasons.
Once that evidence was thrown out, there were no longer any material facts to be in dispute, thus his summary judgment to throw out the claims themselves.
This guy needs to seriously pay attention to the experts. His own preconceived IANAL opinions count for shit.
It looks like SCO and Microsoft, their previous shills having reached their limit on licking their masters' vomit, have found a new shill.
for some information government regulations, studies and inspections *are* the best way to get it.
There is no correlation between information availability and government regulators. Private companies which do inspections could post the results just as easily. It would quickly become apparent that restaurants without posted results either had no inspections or were too embarrassed to post them, and it would also quickly become apparent which inspectors did a good job. With one source of inspections (the government), you and the restaurants have zero choice of inspectors. What if the expensive restaurants want daily inspections, or weekly? What if they want more detail in the posted results? if anything, the fancy restaurants posting more detail more frequently will shame the cheaper restaurants into getting more and better inspections.
There is almost nothing the government does that can't be done just as well as y private companies, and as long as there are multiple private companies doing it, they will do it better. About the only exceptions are the court system and national defense.
That's an intelligent reply. All that cussing really validates your thoughts well.
Hong Kong, the US, there's a great worthwhile comparison. Who says they have anywhere near the same cultural standards, standard of living, crowding, etc? Let's compare, oh, Lagos next. Or any other random city somewhere on the world.
Who said that tech would cost $50K? Who said the current inspection regime has no cost? Again you compare apples and oranges.
You think capital is expensive, you're right. But cameras are cheap. Try pricing them before spouting garbage which only shows how little you know. Consider that fancy restaurants would take up the new tech first and the tech would spread on down as it matured. Stop living in the stone age from which your corruptible human inspectors come from.
No employee has a right to keep their job when it becomes obsolete. It sounds like you are palsy with your inspector friends and want them guaranteed lifetime jobs at taxpayer expense -- or did you think taxpayer jobs were paid for from thin air? When they can be replaced, they will be freed up for more productive jobs. If you don't like that, go find a planned centralized economy with jobs guaranteed for life. Oh wait -- those economies went bust. Dang. Too bad for you and the other layabouts who want guaranteed public taxpaying jobs. Must suck to have no skills other than carrying a clipboard and counting rat feces and taking bribes.
The problem is simple. A bureaucracy is a centralized economy. It work if society were static and bureaucrats had years and years to fine tune the allocation of workers. So many workers for this steel factory, so many for this car plant, so many potato farmers. You could optimize the holy heck out of the workers, keep everyone happy, everything humming smoothly. No excess capacity going to waste, no workers over- or under-worked.
Then a work retires, or gets sick, or dies. Where do you get the replacement? Well, I guess you could have a pool of replacement workers ready, ie, unemployed, but they'd need training. So everyone else on that shift of that section has to fill in while the replacement is found and trained.
What happens if the plant suffers a breakdown, or a tornado, hurricane, flood, etc, strikes? Well, now no steel, so you better have some excess capacity in other steel plants, but how much?
What happens if someone invents a better way to make steel? Each shift needs 3 fewer workers and less coal to produce the same amount. Now not only do you have a few workers with nothing to do, you need fewer coal miners, fewer barges and railroad cars transporting it.
A centralized economy simply doesn't deal with stresses like that. Static conditions do not exist.
That's what is wrong with bureaucracies: they are only good at dealing with static conditions.
Why the heck do people want competition and choice in everything except government? What makes people think a government bureaucracy is the answer to anything when they can't even handle the DMV or post office? What is this fear of the free market in the last bastion of bureaucrats run amuck?
Yes indeedy. People who claim to like competition in business want a monolithic government. There are so many things in government hands that don't need to be. My favorite is schools. You have two huge bureaucracies, the school boards and the teachers unions, both competing to control the bureaucracy, both plotting to spend as much money as possible on themselves, neither cares an iota about the students or the parents. Why school vouchers haven't taken off I do not know, but maybe none of them come close to matching the cost of even the public schools. Vouchers, or even letting parents and kids pick among the public schools, won't fix schools by themselves, but they would sure put the bureaucrats and teachers on notice that bad performance won't be acceptable any more, and that is the fire they need lit under their lazy asses. Not that all teachers and admins are lazy and incompetent, but there is no way to get rid of those who are, and for that they must all share the blame.
The bureaucrats which count are not the few elected ones but the vast civil service. There aren't enough elected ones to handle the complaints generated by the number of citizens. Contrast the US's 545 elected national reps with any company which has a far smaller audience. The elected reps only care about those complaints which could make them look good when they raise the issue, and they have almost no effect on getting them re-elected; those complaints are nto where the bulk of votes come from.
As for alternative political parties, not in the US. The two which count are so similar in their quest for power that they are not useful alternatives.
You must really be living in some kind of fantasy world to think the government actually cares about you and your petty complaints. You are one out of 300 million and probably don't give squat to election campaigns. I can't imagine what kind of upbringing would mislead someone as you have been.
Which is more likely to respond to public outcry? The government, of course.
You must be joking. The government has too many shareholders and none of them have any alternative. It is controlled by bureaucrats who are in more danger of losing their jobs from doing something -- anything -- than doing the wrong thing. Compare that to multiple companies, where not only are the bureaucrats capable of being fired, whether for doing the wrong thing or for any other reason, but if the complainer doesn't like the response, they have an alternative. The alternatives may not be much better, but at least they exist, and that competition is more likely to make for responsive companies than any government bureaucracy ever will be.
Exactly, and my point is that when a single government monopoly run by bureaucrats is the only defense against corporate bureaucracies, the situation is ripe for corruption and favoritism and plain old politics. If monopolies are evil, why should the government be the only one able to bring charges against monopolies, or any other corporate malfeasance which restricts choice and information? That's one point of weakness. I'd rather treat citizens as intelligent enough to take care of their own lives, and not take away the tools they need to do so.
Adam Smith requires choices and information. Those are the natural enemies of bureaucracies.
Slashdot Mirror
However, the anus and the urethra are usually no problem.
But they aren't interfaces between two people in the same way (even for those who think paedophile jokes apply). They are interfaces within a person.
the non-intuitive (if short) command syntax of vi
The only truly intuitive interface is the nipple.
The usual disclaimer: I will not read a Dvorak column, so I am ass-u-ming here that if he does bring up this point, he does so so cursorily that you did not think it worth mentioning.
The financial justification for the OLPC is NOT OLPC vs rice, but OLPC vs printed textbooks. The OLPC is financed by replacing printed textbooks.
You lose heavy, out of date, hand me down textbooks which are almost certainly in some foreign language, expensive to obtain, expensive to distribute.
You gain up to date digital textbooks in the native language, all of which can be easily carried at once, which are easily distributed, and whose cost is limited to the initial production and translation only.
There is another point which Dvorak has backwards. Which is more insulting to a third worlder, to give him rice which destroys his own agriculture and tells him he is too stupid to learn, or to give him textbooks which he cannot produce on his own and which give him hope for the future? Dvorak seems to think it is better to keep the third world ignorant and dependent on foreigners for food, rather than have them learn and stand on their own legs become competitors. That is the true insult.
Okay genius, explain to me how many radars you would mount and where. Consider that the closest ANY plane has to full coverage is the AWACS, and they don't have coverage above or below except at a sufficient distance for the cone of coverage to reach the ground.
Remember, each radar sends out beams. Whether from a dish or electronically steered, they still send out beams. They don't fill the surrounding space with some kind of field that magically reports back disturbances in the force. They send out beams and read reflections. Like you with a flashlight and telescope.
Explain why lacking a pilot suddenly makes it feasible.
The military spends squillions of dollars on this stuff, and still don't have it. Are you that much better?
Flamebait my wiki ass. Who modded it that way, Jimbo and the wiki elite?
Moderators on crack, no. Moderators from wiki, wouldn't be surprised. All you other non-wiki moderators need to jump in and correct this.
"Whoever" was Netflix, and I think they and their millions of mailers are more knowledgeable about their operations than you and your 60,000 mailers at a different company in a different situation.
Sorry, I didn't realize that being a UAV changed the laws of physics, nor that all planes always approached from ahead. My bad.
Instead of just parroting somebody, as if that is great satire from an intellectual mind, why don't you actually do some work there and type in a few real rebuttals?
You know, something like this:
Copyright law is a great evil in society
No, Disney invested a lot of money in Steamboat Willie and deserves to have it protected until the end of time. The idea that anyone should be able to steal somebody else's idea is communist and anarchist. Why, what would have happened if anyone could steal anyone else's great works, like Buster Keaton or Rudyard Kipling?
Windows is actively damaging to a child's education
You don't want to teach children how to think for themselves. That makes for terrible consumers. Better to wait until they have grown up and shown responsibility before lettnig them learn how to think independently and work out puzzles on their own.
Windows encourages a poor mental model of computation...from its... "priacy is bad"...
Of course piracy is bad! The MPAA and RIAA have put a lot of work into creating laws for us to follow (see the second point above) and it is their prerogative to make us pay for every time we listen to anything and to pay for singing Happy Birthday -- you didn't write it, why should you get to sing somebody else's hard work for free? What makes you think you should be able to pay once and listen to something on several different devices or at different times? Next thing you know, people will consider it their right to play music on a stereo that multipel people can listen to at once without individual headphone-enabled properly paid for copies.
No, Netflix said they are paying a rate that entitles them to have the post office pick up their mailers, but Netflix delivers them anyway. That is the $100M cost savings. Netflix says they are either paying too much or the post office is saving by not doing work they are paid for.
Why did you assume you knew what I wrote, no matter how unclear it was, when you could have paused for a couple of seconds and thought that if it seemed so obviously wrong, maybe you misunderstood it?
How often do you mod? It would explain a lot of bizarre mods.
Are you one of those morons who see the word "radar" and think it magically sees everything around it?
Radar is like using a flashlight and a telescope to see around you. It has to be aimed at each position. The farther away you want to see, the more powerful flashlight and telescope you need, and the longer it takes to build up an idea of what is out there. Plus it is pretty dang tricky to look behind you. AWACS planes with those huge circular radars on top have trouble looking straight up or down. Radar in typical airliners only looks in a cone faced forward and won't detect that plane below you which is rising as you are descending, or to the side coming in your direction.
The OLPC is premised on the fact that it replaces expensive hand me down textbooks with digital info. Right now, most third world textbooks are hand me downs from other countries, likely not in their native language, out of date, and beaten up.
The OLPC has digital textbooks. Not only can all textbooks be carried back and forth on that five mile walk between home and school, but the only hurdle to being up to date and in the native language is the initial writing, not the cost of printing and the cost of distributing.
This is a HUGE gain financially, and having the possibility of up to date books in the native language is beyond a price comparison.
The OLPC is a win even if you ignore the advantage of inquisitive minds exploring far beyond what is in textbooks.
Netflix also said they pay for pickup service even tho they deliver their shipments to the post office, at an estimated $100M savings to the post office. They could either demand the post office pick up as they are paid to do, or charge less for what they don't do.
Either way, this is nothing but a conflict of interest from that so-called analyst. I wonder if the SEC will investigate him for this.
Sometimes it's fun to bait the mods. I got a dumb one this time, who decided since he didn't catch the joke, it must be off topic.
Mods forever! Dumbness rules!
if the judge was making decisions regarding the credibility of witnesses he was exceeding his authority in the summary judgment phase
No, the judge is allowed and probably required to throw out witnesses who have no direct knowledge, who are not experts in what they claim to be expert in, who try to introduce new subjects into testimony on old subjects, etc etc etc. That is what the judge did, and the fact that that illegal evidence was all that SCO could muster for their claims is what got the claims thrown out. When there are no material facts for a jury, there is no need for a jury.
If this decision was incorrect--it looks like it was--
It only looks like it was to the columnist shill. Anyone who has followed groklaw for lo these many years knows otherwise. SCO's evidence was invalid for many reasons, which is why there are no material facts for a jury to evaluate.
PJ has made it abundantly clear that what the judge threw out was not claims, but evidence. Too bad for SCO that the only evidence for most of their claims was invalid. PJ also made that really clear, that the evidence was thrown out because it came from people who were not qualified, by the legal rules of evidence, to make those claims, or it was beyond deadlines, or any number of reasons.
Once that evidence was thrown out, there were no longer any material facts to be in dispute, thus his summary judgment to throw out the claims themselves.
This guy needs to seriously pay attention to the experts. His own preconceived IANAL opinions count for shit.
It looks like SCO and Microsoft, their previous shills having reached their limit on licking their masters' vomit, have found a new shill.
the British Navy
Royal Navy, Royal! Good God Almighty!
Is he twins?
for some information government regulations, studies and inspections *are* the best way to get it.
There is no correlation between information availability and government regulators. Private companies which do inspections could post the results just as easily. It would quickly become apparent that restaurants without posted results either had no inspections or were too embarrassed to post them, and it would also quickly become apparent which inspectors did a good job. With one source of inspections (the government), you and the restaurants have zero choice of inspectors. What if the expensive restaurants want daily inspections, or weekly? What if they want more detail in the posted results? if anything, the fancy restaurants posting more detail more frequently will shame the cheaper restaurants into getting more and better inspections.
There is almost nothing the government does that can't be done just as well as y private companies, and as long as there are multiple private companies doing it, they will do it better. About the only exceptions are the court system and national defense.
That's an intelligent reply. All that cussing really validates your thoughts well.
Hong Kong, the US, there's a great worthwhile comparison. Who says they have anywhere near the same cultural standards, standard of living, crowding, etc? Let's compare, oh, Lagos next. Or any other random city somewhere on the world.
Who said that tech would cost $50K? Who said the current inspection regime has no cost? Again you compare apples and oranges.
You think capital is expensive, you're right. But cameras are cheap. Try pricing them before spouting garbage which only shows how little you know. Consider that fancy restaurants would take up the new tech first and the tech would spread on down as it matured. Stop living in the stone age from which your corruptible human inspectors come from.
No employee has a right to keep their job when it becomes obsolete. It sounds like you are palsy with your inspector friends and want them guaranteed lifetime jobs at taxpayer expense -- or did you think taxpayer jobs were paid for from thin air? When they can be replaced, they will be freed up for more productive jobs. If you don't like that, go find a planned centralized economy with jobs guaranteed for life. Oh wait -- those economies went bust. Dang. Too bad for you and the other layabouts who want guaranteed public taxpaying jobs. Must suck to have no skills other than carrying a clipboard and counting rat feces and taking bribes.
What a load of angst.
The problem is simple. A bureaucracy is a centralized economy. It work if society were static and bureaucrats had years and years to fine tune the allocation of workers. So many workers for this steel factory, so many for this car plant, so many potato farmers. You could optimize the holy heck out of the workers, keep everyone happy, everything humming smoothly. No excess capacity going to waste, no workers over- or under-worked.
Then a work retires, or gets sick, or dies. Where do you get the replacement? Well, I guess you could have a pool of replacement workers ready, ie, unemployed, but they'd need training. So everyone else on that shift of that section has to fill in while the replacement is found and trained.
What happens if the plant suffers a breakdown, or a tornado, hurricane, flood, etc, strikes? Well, now no steel, so you better have some excess capacity in other steel plants, but how much?
What happens if someone invents a better way to make steel? Each shift needs 3 fewer workers and less coal to produce the same amount. Now not only do you have a few workers with nothing to do, you need fewer coal miners, fewer barges and railroad cars transporting it.
A centralized economy simply doesn't deal with stresses like that. Static conditions do not exist.
That's what is wrong with bureaucracies: they are only good at dealing with static conditions.
Why the heck do people want competition and choice in everything except government? What makes people think a government bureaucracy is the answer to anything when they can't even handle the DMV or post office? What is this fear of the free market in the last bastion of bureaucrats run amuck?
And thank you!
Yes indeedy. People who claim to like competition in business want a monolithic government. There are so many things in government hands that don't need to be. My favorite is schools. You have two huge bureaucracies, the school boards and the teachers unions, both competing to control the bureaucracy, both plotting to spend as much money as possible on themselves, neither cares an iota about the students or the parents. Why school vouchers haven't taken off I do not know, but maybe none of them come close to matching the cost of even the public schools. Vouchers, or even letting parents and kids pick among the public schools, won't fix schools by themselves, but they would sure put the bureaucrats and teachers on notice that bad performance won't be acceptable any more, and that is the fire they need lit under their lazy asses. Not that all teachers and admins are lazy and incompetent, but there is no way to get rid of those who are, and for that they must all share the blame.
The bureaucrats which count are not the few elected ones but the vast civil service. There aren't enough elected ones to handle the complaints generated by the number of citizens. Contrast the US's 545 elected national reps with any company which has a far smaller audience. The elected reps only care about those complaints which could make them look good when they raise the issue, and they have almost no effect on getting them re-elected; those complaints are nto where the bulk of votes come from.
As for alternative political parties, not in the US. The two which count are so similar in their quest for power that they are not useful alternatives.
You must really be living in some kind of fantasy world to think the government actually cares about you and your petty complaints. You are one out of 300 million and probably don't give squat to election campaigns. I can't imagine what kind of upbringing would mislead someone as you have been.
Which is more likely to respond to public outcry? The government, of course.
You must be joking. The government has too many shareholders and none of them have any alternative. It is controlled by bureaucrats who are in more danger of losing their jobs from doing something -- anything -- than doing the wrong thing. Compare that to multiple companies, where not only are the bureaucrats capable of being fired, whether for doing the wrong thing or for any other reason, but if the complainer doesn't like the response, they have an alternative. The alternatives may not be much better, but at least they exist, and that competition is more likely to make for responsive companies than any government bureaucracy ever will be.
Exactly, and my point is that when a single government monopoly run by bureaucrats is the only defense against corporate bureaucracies, the situation is ripe for corruption and favoritism and plain old politics. If monopolies are evil, why should the government be the only one able to bring charges against monopolies, or any other corporate malfeasance which restricts choice and information? That's one point of weakness. I'd rather treat citizens as intelligent enough to take care of their own lives, and not take away the tools they need to do so.
Adam Smith requires choices and information. Those are the natural enemies of bureaucracies.