These people are hungry! Isn't it more important to get them clean water? Why would people who make less than a dollar a day want a computer? It's all a plot to enable the next generation of outsourcing. These people need sewing kits, not computers! If you give computers away you are furthering the evil cult of altruism. The color is uggggggly! How can I buy one?
There. Did I miss any?
Now you can talk about the contents of the article rather than blather about the same stuff that comes up every time the One Laptop Per Child project gets discussed.
. . . don't take it personally. I don't actually have a grudge against the machines. In fact, I was going to write "Osbourne" but somehow "Kaypro" seemed funnier.
Also, Osbournes had rounded edges. The Kaypro luggables I remember hard square edges. That would hurt a lot more.
An old Kaypro. One of those luggables with two full-height 5.25" floppy drives. This is probably the most useful thing you could do with such a system other than breaking it down into raw materials.
The only question would be to aim for the knees or the solar plexus.
. . . for those who haven't figured out the trick of fusing images by crossing their eyes.
* * *
Funky fictional anecdote.
Olaf Stapledon's science fiction "novel" (more like a future history) Last and First Men covers the evolution of humanity from us poor demi-apes to a hyper-evolved species living on a terraformed Neptune two billion years from now.
These "last men" are not only telepathic (and have 96 genders and look like anthropomorphic animals), but they can communicate with themselves across time.
Stapledon describes the "last men" astronomers staring at the sky, sending a telepathic impression of the sight one-half of a Neptune year in the future, where their future selves integrate it with their own observation of the sky to create a wide-baseline 3D parallax image of the heavens.
Sometimes stories just go back, and not forth. I suspect this is one of them.
Back in the Apollo days, a Saturn V third stage was allowed to smash into the moon so seismographs could pick up the vibrations. This and other tests allowed scientists to get a basic idea of the moon's interior structure. A core or crust of ice would have been pretty obvious. If there was any ice, it would have to be just traces.
Our instruments are getting increasingly better. This is a case of a hypothesis based on observations by a crude instrument being disproved by follow-up investigations by more sophisticated gear.
I'm disappointed, but hey, the universe wasn't designed to things easy for us.
In one of William Gibson's novels, there's a company called Sandbenders which makes super-artsy laptop cases. The cases are intended to be permenant; you buy (and periodically replace as technology progresses) the silicon guts of the machine.
Until a couple of decades ago, it was very common for televisions to have elaborate wooden cases. My grandmother had one; when she upgraded to color we got her old set for the basement playroom.
Old-style radios also came in elaborate wooden cases.
These olde beasts had vacuum tubes, which used high voltage and put off substantial amounts of heat. They didn't have (or need) cooling fans.
Worries about fire are overblown. Or maybe overheated? Ehhh, sorry.
A few months back, I went to a local model rocket launch. It was on a farm in a beautiful chunk of Oregon (See the background of this: http://home.comcast.net/~stefan_jones/hustler_pose .jpg). Dozens of geeks and their families were there, launching model rockets big and small into the sky.
More than a few of the kids present were squatting on the ground, or in car seats, blank expressions on their faces, banging away at portable game machines.
How pathetic.
Someday these kids will need to take special classes to learn how to walk on dirt.
Ion drives are very efficient, but have very low thrust.
It would take months and months of circling the earth to get to escape velocity and headed to Mars. You'd need to store supplies for those months, and provide additional costly shielding to protect against flares and background radiation.
Then you have to do another big velocity change on the other side. Lots of time getting into a low circular orbit you can deploy a lander from.
In this case, a chemical rocket might actually be a better choice!
Even better would be a nuclear thermal rocket, like a modernized version of NERVA. If you have one of those, you may as well carry a spare reactor that can power a ion thruster to make the trip shorter.
Um, seriously, I don't have the slightest sympathy for HP. Look at ad circulars from electronics places. If they have a sale or a coupon for ink carts, there's generally fine print at the bottom: "HP excepted."
. . . but if you rewind the VCR of evolution and let it play again, the show won't be the same.
It could tens of thousands of years for all the niches to re-fill. And because ecological niches are defined in large part by what life is already around, the new species that arise won't be the same as the ones we are used too and benefit from.
We could end up with an ocean without fish worth eating. They could be bony or greasy or, like a lot of fish species, poisonous.
And the human survivors living in the depleted, impoverished ecosystems we leave behind will utterly despise us for our careless, irresponsible, wasteful ways.
One possible consequence, down the road: Ocean waters become acid enough to prevent phytoplankton from forming exoskeletons.
Which means the entire marine ecosystem collapses, and Red Lobster is reduced to offering All You Can Eat Guppy Fry-Days. (Oxygen fee waived for parties over ten.)
I would be if they were balls-out scrappers for freedom and liberty for all humans. But too often they stop at property rights, and assume that a good round of deregulation and tax cuts will fix everything else.
Freedom and rights have to be fought for. The enemy isn't just the government; it includes corporations.
Human rights must come before corporate rights. Too many Libertarians I know seem uncomfortable with that.
So, which party to turn to? Right now, there's no clear choice. But for now, the first step is denying Bush the convenience of a rubber stamp congress.
That means holding your nose and voting Democratic this fall.
Slashdot Mirror
I would have, but I needed to make a snarky comment.
Thanks pieleric!
These people are hungry! Isn't it more important to get them clean water? Why would people who make less than a dollar a day want a computer? It's all a plot to enable the next generation of outsourcing. These people need sewing kits, not computers! If you give computers away you are furthering the evil cult of altruism. The color is uggggggly! How can I buy one?
There. Did I miss any?
Now you can talk about the contents of the article rather than blather about the same stuff that comes up every time the One Laptop Per Child project gets discussed.
. . . don't take it personally. I don't actually have a grudge against the machines. In fact, I was going to write "Osbourne" but somehow "Kaypro" seemed funnier.
Also, Osbournes had rounded edges. The Kaypro luggables I remember hard square edges. That would hurt a lot more.
An old Kaypro. One of those luggables with two full-height 5.25" floppy drives. This is probably the most useful thing you could do with such a system other than breaking it down into raw materials.
The only question would be to aim for the knees or the solar plexus.
Be sure to assign lots of Handymen to the exit area. Sounds like this thing will have a maxed out the Nausea Rating.
Must . . . scrub . . . frontal lobes . . .
Panasonic Giant-eyed Android Girlfriend. With attachments. Special bukkake tolerance and tentacle action upgrades extra.
Nintendo Real-Live Novelty Puppies that look like latest faddish breed that expire and turn into harmless powder when kids lose interest.
Mitusui Otaku Isolation Pod Apartments with Gigabit Ethernet and pneumatic tube system for delivering toys, take-out food.
Homeland Security and the CCLA (Concerned Citizens Liking Advertising*) can now reveal the horrible truth:
MythTV is a front for American's sworn enemy, Al-Qaida.
Also, some people who use MythTV have French accents, and many others have eaten French Bread.
Do the right thing. Install a wholesome, American operating system on your MythTV box and run a Advertising Ready (tm)** PVR solution.
It's the patriotic thing to do.
And we'll be watching.
* A product of the National Association of Broadcasters.
** Advertising Ready is a registered trademark of your friends and fellow consumers at AWMC (Americans Welcoming Mind Control) ***
*** A product of [REDACTED BY HOMELAND SECURITY]
. . . for those who haven't figured out the trick of fusing images by crossing their eyes.
* * *
Funky fictional anecdote.
Olaf Stapledon's science fiction "novel" (more like a future history) Last and First Men covers the evolution of humanity from us poor demi-apes to a hyper-evolved species living on a terraformed Neptune two billion years from now.
These "last men" are not only telepathic (and have 96 genders and look like anthropomorphic animals), but they can communicate with themselves across time.
Stapledon describes the "last men" astronomers staring at the sky, sending a telepathic impression of the sight one-half of a Neptune year in the future, where their future selves integrate it with their own observation of the sky to create a wide-baseline 3D parallax image of the heavens.
No. I don't know what Stapledon smoked.
Stefan
Sometimes stories just go back, and not forth. I suspect this is one of them.
Back in the Apollo days, a Saturn V third stage was allowed to smash into the moon so seismographs could pick up the vibrations. This and other tests allowed scientists to get a basic idea of the moon's interior structure. A core or crust of ice would have been pretty obvious. If there was any ice, it would have to be just traces.
Our instruments are getting increasingly better. This is a case of a hypothesis based on observations by a crude instrument being disproved by follow-up investigations by more sophisticated gear.
I'm disappointed, but hey, the universe wasn't designed to things easy for us.
In one of William Gibson's novels, there's a company called Sandbenders which makes super-artsy laptop cases. The cases are intended to be permenant; you buy (and periodically replace as technology progresses) the silicon guts of the machine.
Until a couple of decades ago, it was very common for televisions to have elaborate wooden cases. My grandmother had one; when she upgraded to color we got her old set for the basement playroom.
Old-style radios also came in elaborate wooden cases.
These olde beasts had vacuum tubes, which used high voltage and put off substantial amounts of heat. They didn't have (or need) cooling fans.
Worries about fire are overblown. Or maybe overheated? Ehhh, sorry.
Stefan
I thought "Build-a-Robot Delivers Joy" was a euphamism for "custom built sex android."
. . . they're employing their core competency to leverage creation of a favorable issue environment.
Put another way, what they're doing is encouraging the creation of a population of irate soreheads programmed to doubt anything on command.
I mean, dang, there are a lot of folks out there who think Penn Jillette and Micheal Crichton are authorities on global warming and second hand smoke.
A pirate walks into a jewelry store.
"Arr, matey! How much to get me lobes pierced?" he asks the shop keeper.
"Buccaneer, of course!"
(Ducks.)
A few months back, I went to a local model rocket launch. It was on a farm in a beautiful chunk of Oregon (See the background of this: http://home.comcast.net/~stefan_jones/hustler_pose .jpg). Dozens of geeks and their families were there, launching model rockets big and small into the sky.
More than a few of the kids present were squatting on the ground, or in car seats, blank expressions on their faces, banging away at portable game machines.
How pathetic.
Someday these kids will need to take special classes to learn how to walk on dirt.
Rather than the clunky, misleading, and overly broad use of "Earth like," I wish articles like this would use the perfectly good term "terrestrial."
Mercury, Venus, Mars and Earth are all terrestrials. Rocky worlds, as opposed to gas giants or icy bodies.
Three-toed sloths are an obvious first candidate to become earth's second sapient species.
They can be put to work installing Wi-Fi nodes and spy cameras on telephone poles.
And if they decide to rebel against their human creators, it will be really easy to outrun them.
Ion drives are very efficient, but have very low thrust.
It would take months and months of circling the earth to get to escape velocity and headed to Mars. You'd need to store supplies for those months, and provide additional costly shielding to protect against flares and background radiation.
Then you have to do another big velocity change on the other side. Lots of time getting into a low circular orbit you can deploy a lander from.
In this case, a chemical rocket might actually be a better choice!
Even better would be a nuclear thermal rocket, like a modernized version of NERVA. If you have one of those, you may as well carry a spare reactor that can power a ion thruster to make the trip shorter.
. . . from my grubby ink-stained hands.
Um, seriously, I don't have the slightest sympathy for HP. Look at ad circulars from electronics places. If they have a sale or a coupon for ink carts, there's generally fine print at the bottom: "HP excepted."
I'm sorry to hear about your dog, but don't beat yourself up about it, or let this deter you from taking future dogs to the park to socialize.
The transmissible cancer described in the article sounds like a very specific, sexually transmitted illness.
Anyway, dog parks aren't doggy sexual playgrounds. Most specifically ban she doggies in heat, and I don't think play-humping would do the trick.
. . . but if you rewind the VCR of evolution and let it play again, the show won't be the same.
It could tens of thousands of years for all the niches to re-fill. And because ecological niches are defined in large part by what life is already around, the new species that arise won't be the same as the ones we are used too and benefit from.
We could end up with an ocean without fish worth eating. They could be bony or greasy or, like a lot of fish species, poisonous.
And the human survivors living in the depleted, impoverished ecosystems we leave behind will utterly despise us for our careless, irresponsible, wasteful ways.
From the British Royal Society:
"Ocean acidification due to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide"
One possible consequence, down the road: Ocean waters become acid enough to prevent phytoplankton from forming exoskeletons.
Which means the entire marine ecosystem collapses, and Red Lobster is reduced to offering All You Can Eat Guppy Fry-Days. (Oxygen fee waived for parties over ten.)
Catering (five boxes Little Debbies', two liters Mountian Dew): $7.00
Transportation: $52
Equipment: $3,401
Special effects: $2,900
Insurance: $1,200
Legal fees in anticipation of lawsuit from Lucasfilm: $52,000
No, I'm not a libertarian.
I would be if they were balls-out scrappers for freedom and liberty for all humans. But too often they stop at property rights, and assume that a good round of deregulation and tax cuts will fix everything else.
Freedom and rights have to be fought for. The enemy isn't just the government; it includes corporations.
Human rights must come before corporate rights. Too many Libertarians I know seem uncomfortable with that.
So, which party to turn to? Right now, there's no clear choice. But for now, the first step is denying Bush the convenience of a rubber stamp congress.
That means holding your nose and voting Democratic this fall.
And stop being afraid.