If computer technology experts are trying to help in their own way, that's pretty commendable.
Only if it helps.
Not to be overly existentialist, but meaning well doesn't necessarily put food in anybody's mouth, or provide them shelter. The computers are obviously useful, but only after some other needs have been met. I think it's a great thing MIT has done, but a key point is this: when and how the gadgets are deployed is critically important, and they aren't a cure-all. In a lot of places the money would better be spent on something else.
My first concern is that once given away, a very poor family might look towards selling the laptop on the black market for food, clothing, etc. How much expense would be added if biometrics were incorporated into the design so that once a laptop is "mated" to a child, only that child can operate it, thus rendering its worth on the black market so much less?
I can see using biometrics to make the thing a less attractive target for theft. But if somebody needs to sell their computer for food and clothing it is absolutely immoral to keep them from doing that. Priorities.
So you end up manufacturing fewer laptops, but maybe that means more of them end up being used as intended?
Two thoughts. First, if you're selling the things at a loss into a country, the big thing you want to make sure of is that they don't leave the country. What people do with them amongst themselves is not something you'll be able to efficiently control, you probably shouldn't anyway, so don't try.
Second, you really don't want to sell them at a loss. You want to make them so cheap that anyone (in this case probably a relief organization) can afford them. The same relief organization that buys these should fucking well be feeding and sheltering people before giving them laptops...
Uh.. those have been used intensively, as people in for example Iraq and Bosnia can testify. (both of which happen to not be overseas from where I live btw)
Did not mean to imply they were not used, only that they were used overseas. Such a great way to get rid of otherwise troublesome waste.
Lets say that the current government in the USA declines into real facism, and people decide to try to do something about it. How would the US military respond? Is this unlikely?
Actually, the only logical domestic use of a nuke I can fathom would be some scenario involving military units against other military units in some kind of civil war. I don't think they would ever be useful in a situation of the military versus a (lightly) armed citizenry. But in any case dealing with the aftereffects is such a pain in the ass it's not an attractive weapon.
All that assumes a certain level of rationality. You can extend the "mad general" nuclear scenario to a commander in chief, if he's got a few of the right people on his side. Get a few fundamentalist generals in the right positions and start the rapture.
Regardless, tell me about a weapon that was invented and proven to be effective, that went unused.
There are quite a few that haven't been used yet. Which isn't much of a proof, I know.
The whole problem is that scary stuff is bound to be "used" eventually, even if that just means someone in a lab catching weaponized Marburg or some shit and spreading it into the population.
Speaking of biologicals, we can probably point to some specific bioweapons which nobody stockpiles anymore and went completely unused. Which isn't a great answer to your question.
Well, to give one example, Germany invaded France twice in the previous century, not to mention all their other neighbors. Why? We can have a very long debate about the sequence of events that resulted in that, but I doubt anyone can come with a valid excuse for either case, other then that they could and that they wanted to, conquer the territory and resources.
I guess the only answer is that anything a nation can choose to do, they can probably choose NOT to do. The problem then isn't historical necessity, it's just that people (and nations) tend to choose badly sometimes, even if they have a pretty good track record in general. (examples leap to mind)
All that said, I think there are nations with military superiority over their neighbors which are also not much of a threat to those neighbors. It's hard to imagine Switzerland invading Italy, for example. That's important, in a way. We can assume that over an infinite stretch of time where everything remains roughly the same, Switzerland might eventually invade Italy. But it's a heck of a lot less likely than Germany invading France. So talking about necessity is a lot less interesting than talking about what differentiates the various ways of setting up a nation and the various ways of keeping neighboring nations civilized, or not. (the U.N. is sort of meant to do this, I suppose)
I understand your point about nukes, and partially agree with you, it would be silly to use them on someone nearby.. and yet there are quite a few nuclear weapons around that are explicitly made for short range use.
Like depleted uranium slugs, you'll probably just see that stuff used overseas, if at all. It depends on what you're talking about though: I doubt very much if anyone stocks nuclear artillery shells anymore. Those were always sort of a bizarre idea, and our technological superiority in other areas render them redundant. You don't shoot a nuke a short distance from a cannon unless you really have to.
I think I can make a prediction, that if we see that kind of "short-range" stuff used in our lifetime, it'll be by Israel, against invading armor. But a lot would have to go wrong in the mean time.
But I believe it is a guess that is very much in line with the past and with what I would consider typical human behavior.
Part of the reason why I thought the rise of nation-states, among other things, to be pretty important government and culture can actually shape human behavior. As can richness or scarcity of natural resources. That's the danger of historical examples: they aren't necessarily relevant to the current situation.
You can see historical examples of governments and cultures that shape people to make them more or less ready to fight their neighbors. Nations in modern Europe are a lot less likely to fight one another than cities in ancient Greece, for example.
Let me try to make my original statement more clear: Every group of humans having access to better ways to destroy a potential enemy then their neighbors have in the end turned such methods on their neighbors.
Well, the "in the end" part turns your assertion into kind of a boring tautology. If you wait long enough on a historical scale, extremely bad things are bound to happen, but that's not much of an insight. Which countries invade their neighbors? Why? I contend it's not JUST because they have the ability to do it.
Partially I wonder if I misunderstood you because you used the word "neighbor"? Let's be honest: if your method is nuclear war, attacking a country far away, ideally in another hemisphere, is pretty much the way to go. Not a neighboring country. And frankly I believe a hypothetical country that came to rely on nuclear weapons and push-button warfare at the cost of its conventional forces would be much less likely to invade a neighboring country. (The US isn't really at that point yet, since we can buy lots of nukes and a big army, but it will be interesting to see what happens when we are.)
Blah blah. I'm probably as cynical about this stuff as you are, so I'm not going to put up much of a fight. I just think you're overstating the historical inevitability side of it.
It did not happen yet, that is no proof whatsoever. Chances are 100% that one day the USA will.
Come on. There's no proof of this. You're making a guess based on your understanding of history. When you hang a percentage on such inductive reasoning you are just hurting your case by making it harder to take you seriously.
In case you think I am bashing the USA, consider that this also implies one day China will do this, Russia and others as well. That is, unless they either give up their nukes or their neighbors get them as well.
I don't think you are bashing the USA and I'm not one of the people around here who is overly sensitive to that. I don't much care.
50 years of non use aree little to no proof in the face of some 3000+ years of written history
You claim to be basing your reasoning on history, but nukes are something entirely new. They haven't been around 3000 years. Neither have nation-states and any number of other seemingly relevant things.
If you want to draw a specific historical analogy it might be more useful. I don't think you'll find one relevant to your "neighbor-nuking" argument. In any case, just waving your hands and saying "3000 years of history supports my argument" is silly. Be a lot more explicit.
Instead of being on science.slashdot.org they might consider posting this under alqaeda.slashdot.org or ihatetheusa.slashdot.org or www.washingtonpost.com.
Throughout history, each and every country possessing weapons with a destructive power way bigger then their neighbors have used them offensively on their neighbors.
The US has been nuking Mexico and Canada secretly for 60 years.
Why is this modded troll? The poster was demonstrating the falsehood of the parent poster's claim very well.
You can't train adults to be competent engineers. It's simply too late.
Nonsense.
But in most cases it's not even a matter of making engineers out of salesmen or something, it's a matter of training someone with technical skills on the flavor of the month computer language or manufacturing technique. I think the point still stands: companies would vastly prefer searching the entire fricking globe for someone who matches their bullet list of desired qualifications, rather than just taking someone smart and training them on those skills.
There are some legitimate business reasons for that, sometimes. It's still unfortunate for society in the long run.
Both countries have old and due to be replaced space crafts. Difference is Russia's crafts have provened to be more realiable and cheaper.
The difference is a little more profound than that. Their next craft will be an evolution of what they already have. Ours will be completely different than what we're currently flying, since we've spent billions and decades barking up the wrong tree.
Very good points. I was daydreaming just today about how I could convince my fellow liberals that federalism really can work for them.:/
On the other hand, part of the reason why states rights and federalism are not a cure-all is that you still run into the whole rural-vs-city thing, just on a smaller scale. With strong federalism I don't have to worry about those representing quaint country folk imposing an abortion ban on the whole country or something equally ridiculous, but at the state government level we're still going to be having similar arguments, even though the city people and country people have very different desires and needs.
Ideally city people and rural people would be pretty hands-off about how the other half lives. The hard part is drawing the line about how hands-off you want to be. For example, is it worth sacrificing federalism for the sake of correcting a categorical wrong like racial discrimination?
By the US standard, anyway, actions resulting in major organ failure or death are torture, which isn't allowed when, for example, interrogating terrorist suspects. Broken bones probably don't count, because they are repairable.
If one were to strictly parse out the right-wing rhetoric about US "abuse", simple killing wouldn't count as torture. Funny thing.
He wasn't beaten or drugged or tortured, so therefore it's a normal arrest.
The whole "normalcy" bar must have been dropped pretty fucking low when I wasn't looking. Which was the point of:
It's not a sorry state of anything, he was just making a point that there won't be any true permanent affects from it.
No, that's not what he was doing. He was acting as though anything short of being "debilitated" by the police is just fine, and due process or even common sense are not things we ought to demand from our police. Which is stupid nonsense.
This is not an Orwellian episode, it also doesn't make England a police state.
Good point. It's the masses of dumb people like you, who stick up for the police when they do retarded shit like this, that will end up making the country a police state. Thanks for that.
Typically, if you care about swaying someone to your point of view, its best to not insult them. Seems that you do that a lot, given your journal and slashdot postings. You seem to be a rather intolerant and close-minded person, so this will be my last response.
I was hoping you (and other like you) would fall into this trap of thinking I didn't because I said "he wasn't arrested." But what I said was true: he was not arrested...for being suspected terrorist.
Yes, you have clearly outwitted me "and other like me". Pure genius!
How do you know the police didn't have a very good reason to stop him?
It's not the "stopping him" part of the event that's objectionable, genius. It's the part where they search him, find nothing more suspicious than some gadgets, and arrest him anyway.
Getting both sides of the story is only common sense.
But I suppose I'll be labelled an enemy of freedom simply because I believe in withholding judgement until I'm properly informed of the situation.
No, not an enemy of freedom. You're just kind of a dimwit. Hint: the police will never make a detailed statement. You won't hear from the other side. Unless the fellow involved has enough money to litigate a rather expensive case against the police and British law permits it, or if the guy generates enough noise in the press and forces their hand.
That's fine though, wait to be "properly informed" like a good little sheep.
He underwent a little (in his mind a great deal of )
Being forcibly detained and held into the middle of the night is "a little hassle"? No.
Being pulled aside, forced to answer some questions, and maybe missing the train, would have been "a little hassle". He was put in handcuffs and carried off by armed men.
he was not debilitated in any way
Christ. I guess that's the sorry state we're at now, eh? We ought to just be grateful the police aren't "debilitating" us. That would be bad.
This is a fully acceptable and encouraging account of how a terrorist prevention system should work.
... and we've only heard one. Bear that in mind before you blame the police, or profiling, or whatever.
No doubt. The guy ought to STFU and be grateful to the London police that they didn't wrestle him to the ground and shoot him several times point-blank in the head. What an ingrate.
After all, it would be just silly if everyone was so up in arms over the fact that someone was take aside, temporarily restrained, searched, and then allowed to proceed.
I'm sure people like nVidia/ATi would laugh and shake their head at that statement, considering the support hell they'll have to deal with come Vista's release which deliberately breaks all their GL drivers.
They're changing the entire rendering model, Einstein. Somehow I doubt if they're doing this for the purpose of fucking with ATI and Nvidia.
Developing close-source drivers for Linux is such a buttfuckathon compared to any other OS that it's a silly point for you to try to make in any case.
Slashdot Mirror
Only if it helps.
Not to be overly existentialist, but meaning well doesn't necessarily put food in anybody's mouth, or provide them shelter. The computers are obviously useful, but only after some other needs have been met. I think it's a great thing MIT has done, but a key point is this: when and how the gadgets are deployed is critically important, and they aren't a cure-all. In a lot of places the money would better be spent on something else.
I can see using biometrics to make the thing a less attractive target for theft. But if somebody needs to sell their computer for food and clothing it is absolutely immoral to keep them from doing that. Priorities.
Two thoughts. First, if you're selling the things at a loss into a country, the big thing you want to make sure of is that they don't leave the country. What people do with them amongst themselves is not something you'll be able to efficiently control, you probably shouldn't anyway, so don't try.
Second, you really don't want to sell them at a loss. You want to make them so cheap that anyone (in this case probably a relief organization) can afford them. The same relief organization that buys these should fucking well be feeding and sheltering people before giving them laptops...
Ha! No.
It's the goal of exploration. It shouldn't be the guiding philosophy when you're designing your tools, necessarily.
Did not mean to imply they were not used, only that they were used overseas. Such a great way to get rid of otherwise troublesome waste.
Actually, the only logical domestic use of a nuke I can fathom would be some scenario involving military units against other military units in some kind of civil war. I don't think they would ever be useful in a situation of the military versus a (lightly) armed citizenry. But in any case dealing with the aftereffects is such a pain in the ass it's not an attractive weapon.
All that assumes a certain level of rationality. You can extend the "mad general" nuclear scenario to a commander in chief, if he's got a few of the right people on his side. Get a few fundamentalist generals in the right positions and start the rapture.
There are quite a few that haven't been used yet. Which isn't much of a proof, I know.
The whole problem is that scary stuff is bound to be "used" eventually, even if that just means someone in a lab catching weaponized Marburg or some shit and spreading it into the population.
Speaking of biologicals, we can probably point to some specific bioweapons which nobody stockpiles anymore and went completely unused. Which isn't a great answer to your question.
I guess the only answer is that anything a nation can choose to do, they can probably choose NOT to do. The problem then isn't historical necessity, it's just that people (and nations) tend to choose badly sometimes, even if they have a pretty good track record in general. (examples leap to mind)
All that said, I think there are nations with military superiority over their neighbors which are also not much of a threat to those neighbors. It's hard to imagine Switzerland invading Italy, for example. That's important, in a way. We can assume that over an infinite stretch of time where everything remains roughly the same, Switzerland might eventually invade Italy. But it's a heck of a lot less likely than Germany invading France. So talking about necessity is a lot less interesting than talking about what differentiates the various ways of setting up a nation and the various ways of keeping neighboring nations civilized, or not. (the U.N. is sort of meant to do this, I suppose)
Like depleted uranium slugs, you'll probably just see that stuff used overseas, if at all. It depends on what you're talking about though: I doubt very much if anyone stocks nuclear artillery shells anymore. Those were always sort of a bizarre idea, and our technological superiority in other areas render them redundant. You don't shoot a nuke a short distance from a cannon unless you really have to.
I think I can make a prediction, that if we see that kind of "short-range" stuff used in our lifetime, it'll be by Israel, against invading armor. But a lot would have to go wrong in the mean time.
Part of the reason why I thought the rise of nation-states, among other things, to be pretty important government and culture can actually shape human behavior. As can richness or scarcity of natural resources. That's the danger of historical examples: they aren't necessarily relevant to the current situation.
You can see historical examples of governments and cultures that shape people to make them more or less ready to fight their neighbors. Nations in modern Europe are a lot less likely to fight one another than cities in ancient Greece, for example.
Well, the "in the end" part turns your assertion into kind of a boring tautology. If you wait long enough on a historical scale, extremely bad things are bound to happen, but that's not much of an insight. Which countries invade their neighbors? Why? I contend it's not JUST because they have the ability to do it.
Partially I wonder if I misunderstood you because you used the word "neighbor"? Let's be honest: if your method is nuclear war, attacking a country far away, ideally in another hemisphere, is pretty much the way to go. Not a neighboring country. And frankly I believe a hypothetical country that came to rely on nuclear weapons and push-button warfare at the cost of its conventional forces would be much less likely to invade a neighboring country. (The US isn't really at that point yet, since we can buy lots of nukes and a big army, but it will be interesting to see what happens when we are.)
Blah blah. I'm probably as cynical about this stuff as you are, so I'm not going to put up much of a fight. I just think you're overstating the historical inevitability side of it.
Come on. There's no proof of this. You're making a guess based on your understanding of history. When you hang a percentage on such inductive reasoning you are just hurting your case by making it harder to take you seriously.
I don't think you are bashing the USA and I'm not one of the people around here who is overly sensitive to that. I don't much care.
You claim to be basing your reasoning on history, but nukes are something entirely new. They haven't been around 3000 years. Neither have nation-states and any number of other seemingly relevant things.
If you want to draw a specific historical analogy it might be more useful. I don't think you'll find one relevant to your "neighbor-nuking" argument. In any case, just waving your hands and saying "3000 years of history supports my argument" is silly. Be a lot more explicit.
You are a silly person.
Why is this modded troll? The poster was demonstrating the falsehood of the parent poster's claim very well.
Nonsense.
But in most cases it's not even a matter of making engineers out of salesmen or something, it's a matter of training someone with technical skills on the flavor of the month computer language or manufacturing technique. I think the point still stands: companies would vastly prefer searching the entire fricking globe for someone who matches their bullet list of desired qualifications, rather than just taking someone smart and training them on those skills.
There are some legitimate business reasons for that, sometimes. It's still unfortunate for society in the long run.
Train a smart guy with a differing skill set?
'Wait! What is this "train"?'
The difference is a little more profound than that. Their next craft will be an evolution of what they already have. Ours will be completely different than what we're currently flying, since we've spent billions and decades barking up the wrong tree.
Oops.
If you pull the military portion of the budget out of the stack and roll it up lengthwise, it's sort of phallic. I'm just saying...
Very good points. I was daydreaming just today about how I could convince my fellow liberals that federalism really can work for them. :/
On the other hand, part of the reason why states rights and federalism are not a cure-all is that you still run into the whole rural-vs-city thing, just on a smaller scale. With strong federalism I don't have to worry about those representing quaint country folk imposing an abortion ban on the whole country or something equally ridiculous, but at the state government level we're still going to be having similar arguments, even though the city people and country people have very different desires and needs.
Ideally city people and rural people would be pretty hands-off about how the other half lives. The hard part is drawing the line about how hands-off you want to be. For example, is it worth sacrificing federalism for the sake of correcting a categorical wrong like racial discrimination?
Yadda yadda sorry just rambling.
If one were to strictly parse out the right-wing rhetoric about US "abuse", simple killing wouldn't count as torture. Funny thing.
The whole "normalcy" bar must have been dropped pretty fucking low when I wasn't looking. Which was the point of:
No, that's not what he was doing. He was acting as though anything short of being "debilitated" by the police is just fine, and due process or even common sense are not things we ought to demand from our police. Which is stupid nonsense.
Good point. It's the masses of dumb people like you, who stick up for the police when they do retarded shit like this, that will end up making the country a police state. Thanks for that.
I'll miss you!
Yes, you have clearly outwitted me "and other like me". Pure genius!
It's not the "stopping him" part of the event that's objectionable, genius. It's the part where they search him, find nothing more suspicious than some gadgets, and arrest him anyway.
No, not an enemy of freedom. You're just kind of a dimwit. Hint: the police will never make a detailed statement. You won't hear from the other side. Unless the fellow involved has enough money to litigate a rather expensive case against the police and British law permits it, or if the guy generates enough noise in the press and forces their hand.
That's fine though, wait to be "properly informed" like a good little sheep.
Being forcibly detained and held into the middle of the night is "a little hassle"? No.
Being pulled aside, forced to answer some questions, and maybe missing the train, would have been "a little hassle". He was put in handcuffs and carried off by armed men.
Christ. I guess that's the sorry state we're at now, eh? We ought to just be grateful the police aren't "debilitating" us. That would be bad.
You are a complete moron. Please die.
No doubt. The guy ought to STFU and be grateful to the London police that they didn't wrestle him to the ground and shoot him several times point-blank in the head. What an ingrate.
You obviously didn't RTFA. Loser.
They're changing the entire rendering model, Einstein. Somehow I doubt if they're doing this for the purpose of fucking with ATI and Nvidia.
Developing close-source drivers for Linux is such a buttfuckathon compared to any other OS that it's a silly point for you to try to make in any case.
Who says that?
People often say that Linux won't displace Windows, that it won't overtake Windows on the desktop, and so on.