The leaders of OLPC believe the laptops must be much more than electronic substitutes for textbooks if they are to profoundly effect learning. The group, an offshoot of MIT's Media Lab, which Negroponte launched 23 years ago, has based its educational philosophy on the theories of Seymour Papert, a Media Lab professor who pioneered the use of computers in elementary education in 1967. Papert, now retired, developed a theory called Constructionism, which posits that young children learn best by doing rather than by being lectured to. So to create a tool that could deliver more than rote lessons and e-books, OLPC designed the machine and its software to enable collaboration, exploration, and experimentation. "We're hoping that these countries won't just make up ground but they'll jump into a new educational environment," says David Cavallo, OLPC's chief education architect.
CULTURAL IMPERIALISM?
While this philosophy is essential to the mission of OLPC, it's also a source of tension. Current educational leaders in Peru embrace Constructionism, but most countries base their education systems on the idea that teachers pass their knowledge to receptive students. That was a problem for OLPC in China as well as India. India's education department, for instance, calls the idea of giving each child a laptop "pedagogically suspect," and, when asked about it recently, Education Secretary Arun Kumar Rath barked: "Our primary-school children need reading and writing habits, not expensive laptops."
What's misinformed about it? It's skeptical coverage rather than the uncritical puff pieces you'd get in Wired or a blog but I don't think that's a bad thing.
My name is Mike Abacha, I am the son of former Nigerian President Sana Abacha. I will send you $1M (ONE MILLION) US dollars if you send me your AMD64 machine with Gentoo.
Yeah, I found that out later. But I thought it was funny that the first guy I asked referenced the Nazis in his (non) explanation of N and F connectors.
When I was in Munich I had a phone and a PC. The PC had voicemodem so it could act as a answering machine / fax machine. I got some cables to plug it into the phone socket. And the wierd thing is I could get the phone to work or the PC but not both. It turns out that German phone sockets will only allow one device to be connected. Someone said that this was to "prevent eavesdropping. In Germany this is regarded as important because of our experience of Nazism".
I said something like "if the Nazis tapped phones they presumably did it at the exchange, not by having some sinister dude in a leather coat, monacle and jackboots sitting in the spare room taking notes". The German guy explaining gave me a very dirty look.
If it's a well designed processor, that's no problem. I remember programming 6809, position independent was as easy as position dependent (providing you don't move it once it starts running).
Actually one of the interesting side effects of segmentation in x86 was that code was position independent, since all addresses were an offset from a segment register. TSRs and device drivers would quite frequently move themselves around in memory quite a bit in an attempt to reduce their resident size. Since each module had it's own CS and DS values the code would still work if you did this. It meant that you could start of with code like this
Module 1 Code Module 1 Data Module 2 Code Module 2 Data Module 3 Code Module 3 Data
Now suppose you run and find that you don't need Module 2 on this system you can do this
Module 1 Code Module 1 Data Module 3 Code Module 3 Data
Modules 1 and 3 could chuck away all their initialization code and data too. So the resident size could be tiny, a few hundred bytes even if the load size was hundreds of kilobytes. The constant values in the segment registers would change during the move of course, but you could just correct the constants the interrupt service routines loaded.
x64 is supposed to be quite PIC of course, there's an RIP (the 64 bit instruction pointer) relative address mode you can use. x86 wasn't at all PIC - the OS loader needed to fix up addresses if an executable was loaded at an address other than the one it was linked to run at. There's a cost for that - at least in Windows pages containing code are mapped copy-on-write, so even one fixup in a page forces that copy of the executable to have a private copy of the entire 4kB page.
In fact from what I've read Microsoft pressured AMD to add RIP relative addressing because of this. x64 was meant for servers, and servers apparently spend significant amounts of memory on copy-on-write pages due to fixups on x86.
NT based OSs have run on platforms that don't guarantee cache coherency in the past. In fact Windows still runs on Itanium and that AFAIK has Risc like cache coherency sematics - i.e. software needs to use special instructions to force it when needed.
Now you could imagine an Intel platform which would boot with x86/x64 augtomatic cache coherency enforcement, though actually it would be rather inefficient, essentially an emulation. Once a recent OS started the HAL would use special instructions to say "From now on don't enforce it". From that point on it would use special instructions to explicitly flush caches when needed. Intel chips already have MONITOR and MWAIT instructions to handle spinlocks effectively.
So your processor would run old OSs, albeit not quickly, and new OSs quickly if they knew how to switch to software visible coherency management. It could even run old OSs quickly if you used an updated HAL.DLL
there are some spore based viruses and even, organisms that are virtually impossible to destroy.
Hello, my name is Muhammad. I am a student in the tribal areas of Pakistan, majoring in Shariah Law and Biological Warfare. Could you please mail me some samples of the spore based viruses? My boss has asked to give a presentation on them in New York.
I will tell my boss to mail US$1million to you in used notes if you can help me. We will pack it in a lead box to make sure that it is not confiscated by customs.
b) You wouldn't say V2 'wasn't particularly effective' if its 1 ton of high explosive falling at around mach 3 landed on _your_ ass.
They weren't militarily effective compared to British Lancaster bombers or Russian T34s. People have argued that the resources the Germans spent on building high tech stuff would have been better spent on building fighters to defend their factories. Or tanks to halt the Russian invasion. Both of which would have been militarily effective - RAF/USAF carpet bombing of German cities destroyed their industrial base and the Russians eventually captured Berlin and destroyed the regime.
The V2 program was the single most expensive development project of the Third Reich. 6048 were built, at a cost of approximately 100,000 Reichsmarks each; 3225 were launched. Despite being one of the most advanced weapons in WWII, it had virtually no effect on the outcome of the war. According to Freeman Dyson, who was working with RAF Bomber Command, "Those of us who were seriously engaged in the war were grateful to Wernher von Braun....Each V2 cost as much to produce as a high-performance fighter....German forces were in desperate need of airplanes, and the V2 rockets were doing us no damage....From our point of view, the V2 program was almost as good as if Hitler had adopted a policy of unilateral disarmament." It has been estimated that for the cost of the V2 program, Germany could have produced as many as 48,000 tanks. Others say it is fortunate for the Allies that Germany chose not to pursue development of the Wasserfall antiaircraft rocket, which, deployed in large numbers, could have devastated the bomber fleets
48000 tanks or 6000 fighters would have been a far better use of the resources than 6000 V2s. As someone acidly put it "More people died making V2s [they were built with slave labour from a concentration camp] than were killed by them when they were fired"
What is being created here is a cytoplasmic hybrid embryo, where the cells nucleus is fully human DNA, but the cells mitochondria is not replaced and that has a DNA signature of its own, meaning that the cells reproduce as human, but the embryos themselves are only considered to be 99.9% human, and 0.1% animal.
OCP don't count these hybrids as human though. Legally they are swine.
By the way private downloads are also useful if you want to download kiddie porn. How do you feel about that?
That's the cost of living in a free world, like the number of kids who die in car accidents because we don't find it convenient to walk everywhere. It doesn't mean we can't go after people who molest kids. It just means that we have to do actual police work instead of simply putting everybody in a panopticon.
Well if the downloads were truly private you won't be able to go after people downloading them. Actually the link between anonymity and child porn is not theoretical. I suspect if you built a true darknet and it became popular it would be full of that stuff. At least in the UK and US, tabloids would find out and it would get shut down or at least blocked.
Actually since the darknet would also be contributing to copyright infringement on massive scale, the representatives of the copyright owners would probably tip off the tabloids.
The problem is that building darknets and having them blocked might well lead to all sorts of restrictions on "Your rights online" as slashdot likes to call them, given that the people passing laws really don't understand technology. I think that's what annoys me about the whole darknet concept. You're essentially building a lawless anarchy. Very nasty people will move in and then the powers that be will restrict everyones rights when they pass some ridiculous law that forces ISPs to be act as censors. So the net result of this sort of thing may well be less freedom, not more.
The Daleks in Doctor Who have pretty much unlimited technology. Basically they were Nazi analogues, genocidal master race advocates with a taste for cool killing machines. In fact in Doctor Who there was a bit where the Doctor and some Thals were escaping up a shaft. The Daleks wait at the bottom and the Thals call out abuse. Then a Dalek team arrives with an antigravitational disk and starts to ascend the shaft. The Doctor looks down at them and says wistfully "You have to admire their technology". The Thals look at him as if he is mad.
To me that always seemed to be a WWII reference - lovable eccentric but disorganised Doctor (1940's UK) vs fascist but well organised, technically competent but vicious Daleks (Nazi Germany). The Thals even looked a bit like Norwegian resistance fighters. You can imagine British scientists saying the same thing as V1 and V2 rockets started to fall on London at the end of WWII. Of course that's a bit of distortion. The V1 and V2 weren't particularly effective weapons and were mostly the result of a small group of visionaries led by von Braun. The UK had visionaries of course but preferred to bet resources on strategic bombing. I.e in WWII it was a highly regimented society using well proven technology in a very ruthless way as opposed to risking large amounts of its productive capacity on wonder weapons. But that's not the self image the UK has.
If "they'll find something, regardless of what you are saying" isn't handwaving, then nothing is. The Pirate Bay is as high profile as they come, but they haven't been shut down, have they? Freenet can be used for copyright infringement, but it's not illegal to maintain a freenet node. The courts must follow rules, and one of these rules is that you can't convict someone without evidence.
BTW, the advantage that you don't reveal what you download or upload is also useful purely for enhancing your privacy. Businesses and governments around the world are getting nosier.
People have tried to shut down the pirate bay, but it is based in Sweden where it is legal to index torrents that violate copyright. But in probably any other country it would be illegal. Certainly equivalent sites in the UK and US have been shutdown. And people who use the torrents have been prosecuted successfully in most countries, including Sweden. But the RIAA or rather its Swedish equivalent can't shut the site down because it is in Sweden.
Ok, in Sweden this sort of sophistry might work. But I don't think it would in the US or UK and probably not in most other EU countries. And it was those countries I was talking about.
By the way private downloads are also useful if you want to download kiddie porn. How do you feel about that?
No I'm not, the people talking about how the bits of the encrypted, pirated files being indistinguishable from random are. The courts are bound to find some way to shut down this sort of service if it used for copyright infringement. Look at Napster or any of the torrent sites. Everytime they go to court no amount of technobabble can save them. You may not like that, but it's a fact.
Rent is a black hole, you might as well put that money into something substantial.
I hear that argument a lot, and it's bogus. Let's suppose I can get a job in country X that pays well. But it's cheaper to rent than buy there. So I rent in country X and find a country Y where it is good business to buy to let. I buy a house in Y and rent it out and I rent a house in X.
I wonder if it is linked to direct democracy. I've always liked the idea of government by referenda, Athens style, but I wonder if that system is what has caused California to have permanent financial crisis.
Inhaling crack the first time is also a free choice so it shouldn't be illegal does it? Closed source software is like crack, it creates a dependency which gives you power over other people, that's why it is unethical (note I said unethical, not illegal).
Pro tip: If you compare people selling 'closed source software' to crack dealers or Nazis or Nazi crack dealers, it is probably time to turn off your computer and go outside and get some exercise or something.
So what though? It sounds like using Monolith or OFF system to violate copyright is illegal. No surprise there. Probably anyone running a Monolith server is also breaking the law too, so they could be sued a la Napster.
Basically playing shell games with someone else's property is not a good idea, the courts will smack you down if you are caught, no matter how much you try to obfuscate what is going on by with phrases like "there is mathematically no way to distinguish which chunk of random data is the original non-infringing random data and which is the one derived from the copyrighted work"
Slashdot Mirror
You mean this article?
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_24/b4088048125608_page_2.htm
The leaders of OLPC believe the laptops must be much more than electronic substitutes for textbooks if they are to profoundly effect learning. The group, an offshoot of MIT's Media Lab, which Negroponte launched 23 years ago, has based its educational philosophy on the theories of Seymour Papert, a Media Lab professor who pioneered the use of computers in elementary education in 1967. Papert, now retired, developed a theory called Constructionism, which posits that young children learn best by doing rather than by being lectured to. So to create a tool that could deliver more than rote lessons and e-books, OLPC designed the machine and its software to enable collaboration, exploration, and experimentation. "We're hoping that these countries won't just make up ground but they'll jump into a new educational environment," says David Cavallo, OLPC's chief education architect.
CULTURAL IMPERIALISM?
While this philosophy is essential to the mission of OLPC, it's also a source of tension. Current educational leaders in Peru embrace Constructionism, but most countries base their education systems on the idea that teachers pass their knowledge to receptive students. That was a problem for OLPC in China as well as India. India's education department, for instance, calls the idea of giving each child a laptop "pedagogically suspect," and, when asked about it recently, Education Secretary Arun Kumar Rath barked: "Our primary-school children need reading and writing habits, not expensive laptops."
What's misinformed about it? It's skeptical coverage rather than the uncritical puff pieces you'd get in Wired or a blog but I don't think that's a bad thing.
My name is Mike Abacha, I am the son of former Nigerian President Sana Abacha. I will send you $1M (ONE MILLION) US dollars if you send me your AMD64 machine with Gentoo.
Why did they change their name? Were they sick of people saying things like "Live free or Diebold"?
Yeah, I found that out later. But I thought it was funny that the first guy I asked referenced the Nazis in his (non) explanation of N and F connectors.
In my ignorance, I asked myself "where the hell is Bavaria?". So I wiki'd it. Turns out, it's in Germany.
The more you know...
Don't say that to Bavarians. They prefer to be known as the northernmost state of Italy.
When I was in Munich I had a phone and a PC. The PC had voicemodem so it could act as a answering machine / fax machine. I got some cables to plug it into the phone socket. And the wierd thing is I could get the phone to work or the PC but not both. It turns out that German phone sockets will only allow one device to be connected. Someone said that this was to "prevent eavesdropping. In Germany this is regarded as important because of our experience of Nazism".
I said something like "if the Nazis tapped phones they presumably did it at the exchange, not by having some sinister dude in a leather coat, monacle and jackboots sitting in the spare room taking notes". The German guy explaining gave me a very dirty look.
It's no different then a gold digger's behavior
We want Adblock! We want Adblock!
It's something that you need to have.
If it's a well designed processor, that's no problem. I remember programming 6809, position independent was as easy as position dependent (providing you don't move it once it starts running).
Actually one of the interesting side effects of segmentation in x86 was that code was position independent, since all addresses were an offset from a segment register. TSRs and device drivers would quite frequently move themselves around in memory quite a bit in an attempt to reduce their resident size. Since each module had it's own CS and DS values the code would still work if you did this. It meant that you could start of with code like this
Module 1 Code
Module 1 Data
Module 2 Code
Module 2 Data
Module 3 Code
Module 3 Data
Now suppose you run and find that you don't need Module 2 on this system you can do this
Module 1 Code
Module 1 Data
Module 3 Code
Module 3 Data
Modules 1 and 3 could chuck away all their initialization code and data too. So the resident size could be tiny, a few hundred bytes even if the load size was hundreds of kilobytes. The constant values in the segment registers would change during the move of course, but you could just correct the constants the interrupt service routines loaded.
x64 is supposed to be quite PIC of course, there's an RIP (the 64 bit instruction pointer) relative address mode you can use. x86 wasn't at all PIC - the OS loader needed to fix up addresses if an executable was loaded at an address other than the one it was linked to run at. There's a cost for that - at least in Windows pages containing code are mapped copy-on-write, so even one fixup in a page forces that copy of the executable to have a private copy of the entire 4kB page.
In fact from what I've read Microsoft pressured AMD to add RIP relative addressing because of this. x64 was meant for servers, and servers apparently spend significant amounts of memory on copy-on-write pages due to fixups on x86.
http://www.nynaeve.net/?p=192
NT based OSs have run on platforms that don't guarantee cache coherency in the past. In fact Windows still runs on Itanium and that AFAIK has Risc like cache coherency sematics - i.e. software needs to use special instructions to force it when needed.
Now you could imagine an Intel platform which would boot with x86/x64 augtomatic cache coherency enforcement, though actually it would be rather inefficient, essentially an emulation. Once a recent OS started the HAL would use special instructions to say "From now on don't enforce it". From that point on it would use special instructions to explicitly flush caches when needed. Intel chips already have MONITOR and MWAIT instructions to handle spinlocks effectively.
So your processor would run old OSs, albeit not quickly, and new OSs quickly if they knew how to switch to software visible coherency management. It could even run old OSs quickly if you used an updated HAL.DLL
there are some spore based viruses and even, organisms that are virtually impossible to destroy.
Hello, my name is Muhammad. I am a student in the tribal areas of Pakistan, majoring in Shariah Law and Biological Warfare. Could you please mail me some samples of the spore based viruses? My boss has asked to give a presentation on them in New York.
I will tell my boss to mail US$1million to you in used notes if you can help me. We will pack it in a lead box to make sure that it is not confiscated by customs.
Actually I always disable Browser Helper Objects in Internet Explorer, since I've never seen a BHO that I actually wanted.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=298931
It's the same in IE6 if you have SP2 installed
http://www.spywareinfoforum.com/lofiversion/index.php/t91168.html
b) You wouldn't say V2 'wasn't particularly effective' if its 1 ton of high explosive falling at around mach 3 landed on _your_ ass.
They weren't militarily effective compared to British Lancaster bombers or Russian T34s. People have argued that the resources the Germans spent on building high tech stuff would have been better spent on building fighters to defend their factories. Or tanks to halt the Russian invasion. Both of which would have been militarily effective - RAF/USAF carpet bombing of German cities destroyed their industrial base and the Russians eventually captured Berlin and destroyed the regime.
Freeman Dyson said
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2#Assessment
The V2 program was the single most expensive development project of the Third Reich. 6048 were built, at a cost of approximately 100,000 Reichsmarks each; 3225 were launched. Despite being one of the most advanced weapons in WWII, it had virtually no effect on the outcome of the war. According to Freeman Dyson, who was working with RAF Bomber Command, "Those of us who were seriously engaged in the war were grateful to Wernher von Braun....Each V2 cost as much to produce as a high-performance fighter....German forces were in desperate need of airplanes, and the V2 rockets were doing us no damage....From our point of view, the V2 program was almost as good as if Hitler had adopted a policy of unilateral disarmament." It has been estimated that for the cost of the V2 program, Germany could have produced as many as 48,000 tanks. Others say it is fortunate for the Allies that Germany chose not to pursue development of the Wasserfall antiaircraft rocket, which, deployed in large numbers, could have devastated the bomber fleets
48000 tanks or 6000 fighters would have been a far better use of the resources than 6000 V2s. As someone acidly put it "More people died making V2s [they were built with slave labour from a concentration camp] than were killed by them when they were fired"
It's called a BS in Comp Sci for a reason you know.
What is being created here is a cytoplasmic hybrid embryo, where the cells nucleus is fully human DNA, but the cells mitochondria is not replaced and that has a DNA signature of its own, meaning that the cells reproduce as human, but the embryos themselves are only considered to be 99.9% human, and 0.1% animal.
OCP don't count these hybrids as human though. Legally they are swine.
By the way private downloads are also useful if you want to download kiddie porn. How do you feel about that?
That's the cost of living in a free world, like the number of kids who die in car accidents because we don't find it convenient to walk everywhere. It doesn't mean we can't go after people who molest kids. It just means that we have to do actual police work instead of simply putting everybody in a panopticon.
Well if the downloads were truly private you won't be able to go after people downloading them. Actually the link between anonymity and child porn is not theoretical. I suspect if you built a true darknet and it became popular it would be full of that stuff. At least in the UK and US, tabloids would find out and it would get shut down or at least blocked.
E.g. 4chan got blocked in the UK by some ISPs because the moderators weren't removing illegal material
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan#Blocks_in_the_UK
Actually since the darknet would also be contributing to copyright infringement on massive scale, the representatives of the copyright owners would probably tip off the tabloids.
The problem is that building darknets and having them blocked might well lead to all sorts of restrictions on "Your rights online" as slashdot likes to call them, given that the people passing laws really don't understand technology. I think that's what annoys me about the whole darknet concept. You're essentially building a lawless anarchy. Very nasty people will move in and then the powers that be will restrict everyones rights when they pass some ridiculous law that forces ISPs to be act as censors. So the net result of this sort of thing may well be less freedom, not more.
The Daleks in Doctor Who have pretty much unlimited technology. Basically they were Nazi analogues, genocidal master race advocates with a taste for cool killing machines. In fact in Doctor Who there was a bit where the Doctor and some Thals were escaping up a shaft. The Daleks wait at the bottom and the Thals call out abuse. Then a Dalek team arrives with an antigravitational disk and starts to ascend the shaft. The Doctor looks down at them and says wistfully "You have to admire their technology". The Thals look at him as if he is mad.
To me that always seemed to be a WWII reference - lovable eccentric but disorganised Doctor (1940's UK) vs fascist but well organised, technically competent but vicious Daleks (Nazi Germany). The Thals even looked a bit like Norwegian resistance fighters. You can imagine British scientists saying the same thing as V1 and V2 rockets started to fall on London at the end of WWII. Of course that's a bit of distortion. The V1 and V2 weren't particularly effective weapons and were mostly the result of a small group of visionaries led by von Braun. The UK had visionaries of course but preferred to bet resources on strategic bombing. I.e in WWII it was a highly regimented society using well proven technology in a very ruthless way as opposed to risking large amounts of its productive capacity on wonder weapons. But that's not the self image the UK has.
If "they'll find something, regardless of what you are saying" isn't handwaving, then nothing is. The Pirate Bay is as high profile as they come, but they haven't been shut down, have they? Freenet can be used for copyright infringement, but it's not illegal to maintain a freenet node. The courts must follow rules, and one of these rules is that you can't convict someone without evidence.
BTW, the advantage that you don't reveal what you download or upload is also useful purely for enhancing your privacy. Businesses and governments around the world are getting nosier.
People have tried to shut down the pirate bay, but it is based in Sweden where it is legal to index torrents that violate copyright. But in probably any other country it would be illegal. Certainly equivalent sites in the UK and US have been shutdown. And people who use the torrents have been prosecuted successfully in most countries, including Sweden. But the RIAA or rather its Swedish equivalent can't shut the site down because it is in Sweden.
Ok, in Sweden this sort of sophistry might work. But I don't think it would in the US or UK and probably not in most other EU countries. And it was those countries I was talking about.
By the way private downloads are also useful if you want to download kiddie porn. How do you feel about that?
You are handwaving.
No I'm not, the people talking about how the bits of the encrypted, pirated files being indistinguishable from random are. The courts are bound to find some way to shut down this sort of service if it used for copyright infringement. Look at Napster or any of the torrent sites. Everytime they go to court no amount of technobabble can save them. You may not like that, but it's a fact.
I'd take out the references gto Audacity of Hope round here, unless you want to be moderated back into the stone age.
Rent is a black hole, you might as well put that money into something substantial.
I hear that argument a lot, and it's bogus. Let's suppose I can get a job in country X that pays well. But it's cheaper to rent than buy there. So I rent in country X and find a country Y where it is good business to buy to let. I buy a house in Y and rent it out and I rent a house in X.
Ok..exactly again what is the cause of that??
I wonder if it is linked to direct democracy. I've always liked the idea of government by referenda, Athens style, but I wonder if that system is what has caused California to have permanent financial crisis.
Inhaling crack the first time is also a free choice so it shouldn't be illegal does it? Closed source software is like crack, it creates a dependency which gives you power over other people, that's why it is unethical (note I said unethical, not illegal).
Pro tip: If you compare people selling 'closed source software' to crack dealers or Nazis or Nazi crack dealers, it is probably time to turn off your computer and go outside and get some exercise or something.
So what though? It sounds like using Monolith or OFF system to violate copyright is illegal. No surprise there. Probably anyone running a Monolith server is also breaking the law too, so they could be sued a la Napster.
Basically playing shell games with someone else's property is not a good idea, the courts will smack you down if you are caught, no matter how much you try to obfuscate what is going on by with phrases like "there is mathematically no way to distinguish which chunk of random data is the original non-infringing random data and which is the one derived from the copyrighted work"
Exactly. And the point of the article I linked to is that the courts won't fall for it.