Heaps of people remain on slow connections to the Internet across the world meaning that they are cut off from more and more of this new "good" Internet.
Considering that it is impossible to get cheap broadband (and the only way to get broadband is satellite) in so many places in Australia (a "first world" "developed" country) and the situation is apparently similar in the USA, I think we should focus on actually getting people connected before we start going on about video and interactive web programs and the like.
Heck, even on my relativly (compared to dial up) fast connect I still can't use the new Yahoo Mail interface or download videos in any decent time.
I think I prefer a Web without all this fancy junk just yet, I'm happy with simple web apps like forums that don't take much to actually participate.
The police are corrupt, even if you think that they aren't.
Even if the whole force isn't corrupt, there is enough corruption (in this case probably near the top) that stupid bad stuff will still happen.
My guess is that someone told the chief (or whatever the head is called) that the act to "censor" the PirateBay for the reason given was stupid, that it was generating bad publicity and so on. Could it be the government?
For a corporate environment, yes prevent the user from running any software that isn't installed (which does prevent it being a "general-purpose device", but only to the extent that you can't run everything).
For the home user, set up the system so that the system files (and all the applications) are installed in a place where ordinary users can't change them. Then you force them (ordinary users) to run any other software that they want, in a sandbox.
Of course, you don't do away with administrator accounts.
What I propose is not to prevent users doing what they want with their own hardware/system, but simply make it a little bit harder for the uneducated user to fuck the system up. Most X/GNU/Linux distros when being installed ask for a user account as well as a root password. Why? Because running as root all the time is generally fucking stupid.
You mould the system so that the users only install software from the repositories, and if they use software that isn't signed, then it runs in a sandbox.
It should be possible to do all that right now with a Linux or BSD kernel.
And of course, anyone with specific needs can get around all these restrictions, because they have the root password... (which is why my idea isn't like untrusted computing).
This reminds me of the first anti-virus software (and of course, I can't find a reference on the web...). Apparently, the software simply took a "snapshot" of the system and if anything changed, reverted it back.
This is a great way of doing things for corporate systems. Lock the system down so tight that no software not approved can modify any system files (or even, make it so that no software can modify system files...).
For home systems it is slightly more complicated 'cause there isn't a central IT team. What you could do is lock down user accounts so that software not installed by the admin only runs in a sandbox (perhaps cleaning it after every login?) and can only access files in that sandbox. You could also make certain partitions "non-executable" so that files can't even be run on them.
The only trouble with that final idea is that user systems vary so much that you couldn't make a user OS that would easily automatically partition a system that would work for everyone.
So, where was I? Ah yes, it isn't that hard (theoretically) to lock systems down so that they don't (can't) get malware, why are systems designed that way?
The same reason that people care if Munich has adopted Linux. If governments adopt open standards or Free Software, then it makes it gives more credibility to these standards or software.
Currently MS Office is the de facto standard for office software, companies want people who know how to use MS Office. Yet, if they see that they need to be compatible with OpenDocument, then they might start asking for people who can use more general office software, or for people who can use OpenOffice.org.
One reason that people use MS Word so much, and why Free Software alternatives have to be compatible, is simply that the MS Word format is the default. If that changes to something else, why then perhaps we might see more Free Software being adopted.
If nothing else choice is good (Pikachu, I choose you!).
Americans take their privacy seriously? Since when as the average yank done that?
Sure you have some folk who do, but considering the supermarket "loyalty cards" (and it isn't just in the US of course), the various voting things (e.g. who's the hottest "singer"?), using plastic cards to pay for everything and so on...
Meh, I'm sure you get my point, which is that only some people (around the world), take their privacy as seriously as you seem to think.
Hence the "(some)" in that quote. Personally I agree with you, and I consider my self to be an environmentalist.
Of course, oceanographers already do this sort of thing, though not on such a large scale (with so many objects I mean). And of course, they use modern technology, including satellites (See for example http://vathena.arc.nasa.gov/curric/oceans/drifters /drifters.html ).
In that post I was aiming for a "funny" moderation, yet it seems that there are some unamused moderators who think it is redundant(!), even though it was the second post! Ah well.
I think I've just come up with a new money making scheme!
1) Goto shop and purchase large amounts of rubber duckies 2) Emerse them in water and ice for a few years and so 3) Sell them to this company for 50 pounds each 4) Profit!
More seriously, maybe scientists should be getting more brightly coloured floating objects and chucking them in the sea at various points. What about red for Russia (two types, one for each coast), yellow for (no I won't go there...) and various other colours for other countries.
A great way to learn more about ocean currents.
But they would get into trouble with (some) environmentalists, maybe they need to just "accidentally" knock a few more crates overboard?
I have read this too. I can't remember the name of it either... (that's the trouble with reading some much, the authors and titles tend to fade rapidly, even if the ideas stay).
One thing you missed out of your review, the Canadians were vilified by everyone for doing such a thing as making the ICBM's useless. Humans lost space, and they lost their ability to use ICBM's as well. Shit happens hey.
While it is certain if Nader had not been running, that many of the people who voted for him would have voted for Gore, many others would have voted for one of the Socialist candidates (who all received more then 500 votes each in Florida [Source Stupid White Men, M. Moore. (HyperColins Publishers Inc.: USA, 2001.) p.255]).
Sounds like WINE. I can do these things you mention right now, without MS Windows Vista, on my X/GNU/Linux box. Of course, I can't run everything, but still.
Funny about these little things isn't it. And those are just three places I found this troll. I'm not sure where it originated, but still, just goes to show that trolls aren't original.
Doctor Who is not Science Fiction whatever it is. Rather, Science Fantasy, in other words, it appears (especially in these new series) that the producers couldn't give two hoots about real science or similar.
Rather, they make a show that looks good, and makes me (at least) cringe. Sure, it is a good show. I enjoy watching it, but don't call it Science Fiction, a term that really should be reserved for those shows or books that actually tend to follow current scientific thought (even if they sometimes break one or two "laws").
Porn jokes indeed aside. I may not be an "everyman", but I think I'm close enough. My desire for storage (though not yet in the terrabyte range) comes from my photography (no not porn...). I take a bunch of pictures, and well, because storage is cheap I leave them all at the original file size (which in this case is about 2-5 MB depending).
I don't have a proper video camera, but I'm sure that people who do, have even bigger storage requirements.
Not only that, what with all the music you can copy of a friends HD now, your storage just jumps a bit more! (I've got literally more then 10 gigabytes of music on my desktop HD. And I know people who have hundreds of CDs, so if they ripped all those, they would have much more...)
Added to all those movies you can either rip or download... Chuck in a decent network, family and/or friends, and you can now stream all this stuff around to wherever you want it.
I'd say then, that the most common use of all this space, multimedia. Not sure who has terrabytes of multimedia though.
Re:Here's the Cliffs' Notes version
on
DNS Complexity
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
So, sort of like The Game of Life then? I've made the point before (not here though), that The Game of Life is a good example of simple rules creating a (potentially, very) complex situation. I then used it to make the analogy with the universe we live in.
Take gliders for example, you could observe them, and work out how they work, but each type of glider works differently. As such, you would have a different set of rules for each. Unless you noticed that the same (fourish) rules worked all the time. And if you make the system much, much bigger (really have an "infinite" game board), then your constructs get much bigger, and it becomes much harder to see the simple rules under lying the whole thing.
I know, it is just an added bonus of using a more secure browser (because of less functionality) with a more secure OS.
As I said, you have the choice of security or functionality, and in many cases you can't even have either (the scenario of having all the anti-malware products eat up your CPU time, but still doing a crappy job).
If you want real security, you unplug your computer from the network and remove all other forms of accessing it (including the keyboard). It just depends on what you are willing to put up with.
Of course, it is perfectly possible to have a functioning MS Windows PC connected to the Internet and even have a decent browser and have no worries. You just need to have security culture and a firewall the rejects all connections from outside (except those related to web browsing, so that would be everything except port 80, and maybe whatever port FTP is on).
A security culture is the most important thing, and comes from not randomly downloading and installing everything, deleting spam, not opening executable attachments in emails (including in some cases such things as Word Documents!),or at least verifying that the person who sent them to you, really did.
My mother has managed to only (I think) get one virus (or worm, I'm not sure what it was actually) for years. Yet she runs MS Windows XP (SP1 I think). She has a firewall (outdated ZoneAlarm free I think), and she doesn't use IE (rather Mozilla, again outdated). No worries, because she practices security culture (to the best of her ignorant ability). She has an anti-virus, except because the signatures take so long to download (only slow dial up, no broadband in the country) it doesn't get updated so often. No worries though, because she doesn't run random stuff, doesn't go to random websites and doesn't use IE.
Security culture will get you everywhere.
(Also important if you are an anti-state activist. Got to watch out for them police...)
Lynx (or Links) on GNU/Linux (or OpenBSD, or FreeBSD or whatever) (forget X, who needs it?). You get rid of the vast majority of (if not all) attacks made through the browser. The platform is more secure then Windows, and isn't used much, thus not getting much attention by Malware makers.
Of course, it doesn't protect you from stupid acts, such as downloading scripts, 'chmod +x'ing them and running them.
But then again, having GNU/Linux (or whatever) enables you to use chroot (or whatever) to test these u-beut scripts.
Of course, you do loose a lot of the functionality of a GUI and a GUI based browser, but your browsing experience will be faster...
(With functionality comes more code, more places where there might be bugs or problems, thus more potential security holes. If you want an email client that displays HTML email (for example), then you have to accept that you might have problems associated with that.)
Have you investigated the open source versions of Doom and Quake? While maybe a bit dated (the Quake III engine is from 1999), they are GPL and have a lot of community support.
The original Doom engine has been used in a shit load of games since (including games available for a wide variety of platforms, such as portable music players).
The Wikipedia page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_III_engine has a lot more information about the Quake III engine, and a lot of handy links at the bottom (such as http://www.icculus.org/quake3/ "A project to remove bugs, clean up source code and to add more advanced graphical and audio features via SDL and OpenAL, and to act as a clean base package to build other projects on.")
If nothing else, as I said earlier, most sexual abuse on children is by relatives and close family friends. It isn't by "paedophiles", but is rather simply opportunistic. The people we should be worried about are those who actually are abusive, not just those who have thoughts that maybe abusive (or maybe about consensual sex for all we know). QUOTE (http://www.nncc.org/Abuse/sex.abuse.html) Eighty-five percent of sexual assaults on children are committed by someone the child knows and usually trusts - an immediate family member, a relative, a neighbor, or a friend of the family.
QUOTE (http://www.ocfs.state.ny.us/main/publications/Pub 1154text.asp) In many cases reported in New York State and nationwide, children are sexually abused by people they know and trust - relatives (even parents or siblings), friends of the family, and authority figures (teachers, youth group leaders, clergy, etc.). Sexual abuse usually occurs in places where children feel comfortable or safe - at home or in the home of a family friend.
QUOTE (http://www.bbc.co.uk/parenting/your_kids/safety_s exual.shtml) Sexual abuse is far more likely to be carried out by someone a child knows, such as a relative or friend of the family, than by a stranger. And sometimes older children abuse younger children.
A few comments, One, making sure that all the games developed are released under the GPL is a far cry from similar development contests by commercial companies that stipulate that all entries become the property of the sponsoring company, this should encourage people to enter. Two, while the prize is (as far as I can tell) only for the "best" game developed, I'm sure a number of people will enter just for the fun of it, and because their work will still be available to them (see first thought) they won't be worried about it being appropriated for no compensation.
Three, while I can't really think of any "innovative" games using the specific aspects of the XO mentioned (Mesh Networking, Camera and Tablet Mode), I'm sure other folk are more imaginative then I am. (Perhaps something along the lines of hide and seek, using the laptops?)
Four, the idea of a development environment for the children to develop their own games is very important in my opinion. As has been seen with various commercial games, user content often makes or breaks a game, and is often far more fun then the content that came with the game.
Assume a closed system (take the Earth for example...), implement a "free market" economic system (arguments about whether or not it is truly free are irrelevant). This closed system is owned in this economic system (that is, there are no parts that are not owned by somebody or some organisation, who might be a government).
Now you say that a person can win simply by being a part? The more likely outcome is that through bad decisions, bad laws or whatever else, that the majority of people will lose, and a few will win. That's why you see a lot more poor people then rich, because in a closed system, when someone else wins, someone else will lose.
Of course, someone is going to think, "but what about the USA, aren't they winning?", well they might well be, but only because people in third world nations are losing...
(Of course what I said only applies in a "capitalist free market", where you have the possibility that unused property reverts to either common or no ownership as proposed by some anarchist free marketeers (no, not the "anarcho"-capitalists, they aren't anarchists) and I think Adam Smith, then it is possible that perhaps there aren't more losers then winners.)
And them there are some good points. Added to which, they can't even get the permissions correct? Oh wait they aren't tailoring the OS to the hardware are they. I can understand when I install Ubuntu (or whatever) on *my* laptop that I have to enter a password to access the wireless (actually I don't, but that's a different matter), but if they are trying to build something for children and for education, the least they can do is tie the OS to the hardware (al la the OLPC laptop).
And as you said, they can only get two hours!? Thanks, I'll go back to lusting after the OLPC laptop (with a little extra storage space though thanks).
Slashdot Mirror
How about,
Heaps of people remain on slow connections to the Internet across the world meaning that they are cut off from more and more of this new "good" Internet.
Considering that it is impossible to get cheap broadband (and the only way to get broadband is satellite) in so many places in Australia (a "first world" "developed" country) and the situation is apparently similar in the USA, I think we should focus on actually getting people connected before we start going on about video and interactive web programs and the like.
Heck, even on my relativly (compared to dial up) fast connect I still can't use the new Yahoo Mail interface or download videos in any decent time.
I think I prefer a Web without all this fancy junk just yet, I'm happy with simple web apps like forums that don't take much to actually participate.
The police are corrupt, even if you think that they aren't.
Even if the whole force isn't corrupt, there is enough corruption (in this case probably near the top) that stupid bad stuff will still happen.
My guess is that someone told the chief (or whatever the head is called) that the act to "censor" the PirateBay for the reason given was stupid, that it was generating bad publicity and so on. Could it be the government?
Anyway, meh.
Actually, not quite...
For a corporate environment, yes prevent the user from running any software that isn't installed (which does prevent it being a "general-purpose device", but only to the extent that you can't run everything).
For the home user, set up the system so that the system files (and all the applications) are installed in a place where ordinary users can't change them. Then you force them (ordinary users) to run any other software that they want, in a sandbox.
Of course, you don't do away with administrator accounts.
What I propose is not to prevent users doing what they want with their own hardware/system, but simply make it a little bit harder for the uneducated user to fuck the system up. Most X/GNU/Linux distros when being installed ask for a user account as well as a root password. Why? Because running as root all the time is generally fucking stupid.
You mould the system so that the users only install software from the repositories, and if they use software that isn't signed, then it runs in a sandbox.
It should be possible to do all that right now with a Linux or BSD kernel.
And of course, anyone with specific needs can get around all these restrictions, because they have the root password... (which is why my idea isn't like untrusted computing).
This reminds me of the first anti-virus software (and of course, I can't find a reference on the web...). Apparently, the software simply took a "snapshot" of the system and if anything changed, reverted it back.
This is a great way of doing things for corporate systems. Lock the system down so tight that no software not approved can modify any system files (or even, make it so that no software can modify system files...).
For home systems it is slightly more complicated 'cause there isn't a central IT team. What you could do is lock down user accounts so that software not installed by the admin only runs in a sandbox (perhaps cleaning it after every login?) and can only access files in that sandbox. You could also make certain partitions "non-executable" so that files can't even be run on them.
The only trouble with that final idea is that user systems vary so much that you couldn't make a user OS that would easily automatically partition a system that would work for everyone.
So, where was I? Ah yes, it isn't that hard (theoretically) to lock systems down so that they don't (can't) get malware, why are systems designed that way?
Simply really.
The same reason that people care if Munich has adopted Linux. If governments adopt open standards or Free Software, then it makes it gives more credibility to these standards or software.
Currently MS Office is the de facto standard for office software, companies want people who know how to use MS Office. Yet, if they see that they need to be compatible with OpenDocument, then they might start asking for people who can use more general office software, or for people who can use OpenOffice.org.
One reason that people use MS Word so much, and why Free Software alternatives have to be compatible, is simply that the MS Word format is the default. If that changes to something else, why then perhaps we might see more Free Software being adopted.
If nothing else choice is good (Pikachu, I choose you!).
Americans take their privacy seriously? Since when as the average yank done that?
Sure you have some folk who do, but considering the supermarket "loyalty cards" (and it isn't just in the US of course), the various voting things (e.g. who's the hottest "singer"?), using plastic cards to pay for everything and so on...
Meh, I'm sure you get my point, which is that only some people (around the world), take their privacy as seriously as you seem to think.
Hence the "(some)" in that quote. Personally I agree with you, and I consider my self to be an environmentalist.
s /drifters.html ).
Of course, oceanographers already do this sort of thing, though not on such a large scale (with so many objects I mean). And of course, they use modern technology, including satellites (See for example http://vathena.arc.nasa.gov/curric/oceans/drifter
In that post I was aiming for a "funny" moderation, yet it seems that there are some unamused moderators who think it is redundant(!), even though it was the second post! Ah well.
I think I've just come up with a new money making scheme!
1) Goto shop and purchase large amounts of rubber duckies
2) Emerse them in water and ice for a few years and so
3) Sell them to this company for 50 pounds each
4) Profit!
More seriously, maybe scientists should be getting more brightly coloured floating objects and chucking them in the sea at various points. What about red for Russia (two types, one for each coast), yellow for (no I won't go there...) and various other colours for other countries.
A great way to learn more about ocean currents.
But they would get into trouble with (some) environmentalists, maybe they need to just "accidentally" knock a few more crates overboard?
This isn't a fucking troll... For gods sack people...
8 3,00.asp
Just because the link
http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=2097
is directed to the other page unless coming from the other page, doesn't mean it is a fucking troll!
Normal programming now resuming.
I have read this too. I can't remember the name of it either... (that's the trouble with reading some much, the authors and titles tend to fade rapidly, even if the ideas stay).
One thing you missed out of your review, the Canadians were vilified by everyone for doing such a thing as making the ICBM's useless. Humans lost space, and they lost their ability to use ICBM's as well. Shit happens hey.
To quote from http://www.revleft.com/index.php?showtopic=24734
Sounds like WINE. I can do these things you mention right now, without MS Windows Vista, on my X/GNU/Linux box. Of course, I can't run everything, but still.
Dude, at one place you say voting is good (for our political bosses), and then in another you say voting is bad (workplaces). Which is it going to be?
You can't argue, logically, voting in one area, and not the other.
Anyway, because of that leap of illogic, plus the other rubbish you posted about representative democracy, I've dismissed most of what you said.
You talk about dictatorships, and yet seem to support capitalism...
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=67877&cid= 6220788
t hreadID=2246&messageID=11919&start=-1
8 087
http://news.com.com/5208-1030_3-0.html?forumID=1&
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=82711&cid=724
Funny about these little things isn't it. And those are just three places I found this troll. I'm not sure where it originated, but still, just goes to show that trolls aren't original.
Doctor Who is not Science Fiction whatever it is. Rather, Science Fantasy, in other words, it appears (especially in these new series) that the producers couldn't give two hoots about real science or similar.
Rather, they make a show that looks good, and makes me (at least) cringe. Sure, it is a good show. I enjoy watching it, but don't call it Science Fiction, a term that really should be reserved for those shows or books that actually tend to follow current scientific thought (even if they sometimes break one or two "laws").
Porn jokes indeed aside. I may not be an "everyman", but I think I'm close enough. My desire for storage (though not yet in the terrabyte range) comes from my photography (no not porn...). I take a bunch of pictures, and well, because storage is cheap I leave them all at the original file size (which in this case is about 2-5 MB depending).
I don't have a proper video camera, but I'm sure that people who do, have even bigger storage requirements.
Not only that, what with all the music you can copy of a friends HD now, your storage just jumps a bit more! (I've got literally more then 10 gigabytes of music on my desktop HD. And I know people who have hundreds of CDs, so if they ripped all those, they would have much more...)
Added to all those movies you can either rip or download...
Chuck in a decent network, family and/or friends, and you can now stream all this stuff around to wherever you want it.
I'd say then, that the most common use of all this space, multimedia. Not sure who has terrabytes of multimedia though.
So, sort of like The Game of Life then? I've made the point before (not here though), that The Game of Life is a good example of simple rules creating a (potentially, very) complex situation. I then used it to make the analogy with the universe we live in.
Take gliders for example, you could observe them, and work out how they work, but each type of glider works differently. As such, you would have a different set of rules for each. Unless you noticed that the same (fourish) rules worked all the time. And if you make the system much, much bigger (really have an "infinite" game board), then your constructs get much bigger, and it becomes much harder to see the simple rules under lying the whole thing.
I've always wondered what sort of people they are, who troll as anonymous cowards. Now I know, they are like me!
Goatshe . Makes a change for that other URL!
I know, it is just an added bonus of using a more secure browser (because of less functionality) with a more secure OS.
As I said, you have the choice of security or functionality, and in many cases you can't even have either (the scenario of having all the anti-malware products eat up your CPU time, but still doing a crappy job).
If you want real security, you unplug your computer from the network and remove all other forms of accessing it (including the keyboard). It just depends on what you are willing to put up with.
Of course, it is perfectly possible to have a functioning MS Windows PC connected to the Internet and even have a decent browser and have no worries. You just need to have security culture and a firewall the rejects all connections from outside (except those related to web browsing, so that would be everything except port 80, and maybe whatever port FTP is on).
A security culture is the most important thing, and comes from not randomly downloading and installing everything, deleting spam, not opening executable attachments in emails (including in some cases such things as Word Documents!),or at least verifying that the person who sent them to you, really did.
My mother has managed to only (I think) get one virus (or worm, I'm not sure what it was actually) for years. Yet she runs MS Windows XP (SP1 I think). She has a firewall (outdated ZoneAlarm free I think), and she doesn't use IE (rather Mozilla, again outdated). No worries, because she practices security culture (to the best of her ignorant ability). She has an anti-virus, except because the signatures take so long to download (only slow dial up, no broadband in the country) it doesn't get updated so often. No worries though, because she doesn't run random stuff, doesn't go to random websites and doesn't use IE.
Security culture will get you everywhere.
(Also important if you are an anti-state activist. Got to watch out for them police...)
Lynx (or Links) on GNU/Linux (or OpenBSD, or FreeBSD or whatever) (forget X, who needs it?). You get rid of the vast majority of (if not all) attacks made through the browser. The platform is more secure then Windows, and isn't used much, thus not getting much attention by Malware makers.
Of course, it doesn't protect you from stupid acts, such as downloading scripts, 'chmod +x'ing them and running them.
But then again, having GNU/Linux (or whatever) enables you to use chroot (or whatever) to test these u-beut scripts.
Of course, you do loose a lot of the functionality of a GUI and a GUI based browser, but your browsing experience will be faster...
(With functionality comes more code, more places where there might be bugs or problems, thus more potential security holes. If you want an email client that displays HTML email (for example), then you have to accept that you might have problems associated with that.)
Have you investigated the open source versions of Doom and Quake? While maybe a bit dated (the Quake III engine is from 1999), they are GPL and have a lot of community support.
The original Doom engine has been used in a shit load of games since (including games available for a wide variety of platforms, such as portable music players).
The Wikipedia page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_III_engine has a lot more information about the Quake III engine, and a lot of handy links at the bottom (such as http://www.icculus.org/quake3/ "A project to remove bugs, clean up source code and to add more advanced graphical and audio features via SDL and OpenAL, and to act as a clean base package to build other projects on.")
Go get it!
Please don't be fucking stupid. The whole think of the children shit is bullshit. Don't fear monger. The following is from a post I made at another forum (RevLeft.com) http://www.revleft.com/index.php?showtopic=66768&v iew=findpost&p=1292321122 .
b 1154text.asp)
s exual.shtml)
If nothing else, as I said earlier, most sexual abuse on children is by relatives and close family friends. It isn't by "paedophiles", but is rather simply opportunistic. The people we should be worried about are those who actually are abusive, not just those who have thoughts that maybe abusive (or maybe about consensual sex for all we know).
QUOTE (http://www.nncc.org/Abuse/sex.abuse.html)
Eighty-five percent of sexual assaults on children are committed by someone the child knows and usually trusts - an immediate family member, a relative, a neighbor, or a friend of the family.
QUOTE (http://www.ocfs.state.ny.us/main/publications/Pu
In many cases reported in New York State and nationwide, children are sexually abused by people they know and trust - relatives (even parents or siblings), friends of the family, and authority figures (teachers, youth group leaders, clergy, etc.). Sexual abuse usually occurs in places where children feel comfortable or safe - at home or in the home of a family friend.
QUOTE (http://www.bbc.co.uk/parenting/your_kids/safety_
Sexual abuse is far more likely to be carried out by someone a child knows, such as a relative or friend of the family, than by a stranger. And sometimes older children abuse younger children.
A few comments,
One, making sure that all the games developed are released under the GPL is a far cry from similar development contests by commercial companies that stipulate that all entries become the property of the sponsoring company, this should encourage people to enter.
Two, while the prize is (as far as I can tell) only for the "best" game developed, I'm sure a number of people will enter just for the fun of it, and because their work will still be available to them (see first thought) they won't be worried about it being appropriated for no compensation.
Three, while I can't really think of any "innovative" games using the specific aspects of the XO mentioned (Mesh Networking, Camera and Tablet Mode), I'm sure other folk are more imaginative then I am. (Perhaps something along the lines of hide and seek, using the laptops?)
Four, the idea of a development environment for the children to develop their own games is very important in my opinion. As has been seen with various commercial games, user content often makes or breaks a game, and is often far more fun then the content that came with the game.
Can I be the first to say "BULLSHIT!"?
Assume a closed system (take the Earth for example...), implement a "free market" economic system (arguments about whether or not it is truly free are irrelevant). This closed system is owned in this economic system (that is, there are no parts that are not owned by somebody or some organisation, who might be a government).
Now you say that a person can win simply by being a part? The more likely outcome is that through bad decisions, bad laws or whatever else, that the majority of people will lose, and a few will win. That's why you see a lot more poor people then rich, because in a closed system, when someone else wins, someone else will lose.
Of course, someone is going to think, "but what about the USA, aren't they winning?", well they might well be, but only because people in third world nations are losing...
(Of course what I said only applies in a "capitalist free market", where you have the possibility that unused property reverts to either common or no ownership as proposed by some anarchist free marketeers (no, not the "anarcho"-capitalists, they aren't anarchists) and I think Adam Smith, then it is possible that perhaps there aren't more losers then winners.)
And them there are some good points. Added to which, they can't even get the permissions correct? Oh wait they aren't tailoring the OS to the hardware are they. I can understand when I install Ubuntu (or whatever) on *my* laptop that I have to enter a password to access the wireless (actually I don't, but that's a different matter), but if they are trying to build something for children and for education, the least they can do is tie the OS to the hardware (al la the OLPC laptop).
And as you said, they can only get two hours!? Thanks, I'll go back to lusting after the OLPC laptop (with a little extra storage space though thanks).