Exactly what can be taught on a laptop that they can't learn through traditional means?
The issue is not what can be taught on a laptop that can't be taught otherwise, but how the laptop acheives economy in teaching. For instance, compared to the books and consumable school supplies it can replace (delivering information is one of its tools), the OLPC system is inexpensive.
leet programming skillz?
Well, yeah. Programming is an skill with quite a bit of value in the world market that doesn't require a lot of raw material or capital to create value; precisely the kind of thing that having access to the tools to learn and do could avenues for development in places where people aren't starving, but are trapped in persistent poverty.
Exactly...Don't you think that $300 (for the $100 laptop - someone want to explain this??) could go for, oh I don't know, food, medicine, shelter, water purifying machines??
1) The $300 pledge was an idea someone unconnected to OLPC came up with in an effort to get people to buy OLPC computers at above the price they were being sold to the recipient nations as a way of further subsidizing sales to developing nations.
2) Sure, the governments buying them could spend the money on food, medicine, shelter, and water purifying machines. However, those would do little to deal with the problems of education and information access that inhibit economic development. Presumably, the governments buying them have made a judgement that, in their current circumstances, there is more value in the investment in education and economic development that buying into OLPC represents than in spending that money in other places.
What good is a laptop if you are starving and have dysentery?
Billions of people in the developing world are neither starving nor suffering from dysentery.
Technology is not a panacea
Nor is OLPC billed as a panacea.
giving underdeveloped countries laptops isn't going to magically launch them into the 21st century
Nor is anyone suggesting it will magically do anything.
If you want to give poor people computers then give them computers. I have a few old laptops laying around, and I'm sure the big manufacturers could enjoy a big tax write off by donating their surplus stock.
None of which are designed with the particular needs of developing nations in mind. The OLPC systems are, which is why Brazil, Argentina, Nigeria, Libya, and Thailand are already lined up to buy them.
They don't NEED computers, they need everything else that would naturally lead up to the need for computers, like food and clean water and stable governments that care about their citizens.
The countries this is targetted at aren't nations where adequate aggregate food and water are major concerns, but ones where, despite famine not being a major problem, crushing poverty is a real problem, and lack of education and access to capital for most people stops them from escaping it. Just as microcredit programs have done much to encourage economic development with access to capital in many of these areas, inexpensive, ubiquitous computers provide a tool for education and information exchange that attacks another part of the economic problem. It also provides an avenue for information sharing that is, once the computers are distributed, difficult to centrally control, and therefore naturally increases pressure for responsive government by empowering the people.
They would have to improve the infrastructure and change the society to make this project feasible. Third-world nation aren't ready to receive something like this. It's arrogant western thought that they have the end-all solution for everything.
Well, no one involved in the project has sold OLPC or the West more generally as the "end-all solution for everything", nor has anyone said that the recipient nations won't need to do anything additional to just buying the computers to get maximum value out of the project. Nevertheless Brazil, Argentina, Nigeria, Thailand, and Libya are already lined up for the laptops, and more countries are in discussions with OLPC.
Sort of reminds me of England's attempts to "civilize" India a while back. The west does not know what it is doing and will probably end up wasting a lot of everyone's time, money, resources, and environment.
No one is forcing developing nations to buy the laptops. So if this is just the loony West and its misguided ideas, you'd think the developing world would be turning OLPC away. That's not what's happening. Its nothing like England's efforts to civilize India by force, or any other type of colonialism. Its a free choice of the countries to participate, if they don't think its worth their resources, they simply say "no". No one is making it a precondition for, say, membership in in the WTO, access to World Bank or IMF funds, foreign aid, etc. There's nothing being used to push joining but the value to be derived from having the laptops.
I have heard of Judges doing this before. This is why the judicial system has an appeals court. The judge in your case denied you your constitutional right (Amendment 6) to confront your accuser (the state).
6th Amendment rights apply only to criminal cases. Traffic violations are generally not criminal cases in the Constitutional sense, and 6th Amendment rights therefore often do not apply to them.
OTOH, one could make an argument that in a case like this, a 14th amendment due process violation occurred. Not quite the slam dunk that it would be if it was a criminal case and the 6th amendment could be invoked, though.
"Follow the rules, and those suing you are more likely to lose than they would be if you broke them" is more accurate. The idea that lawsuits can only happen to people when they've actually broken the law is, to say the least, wrong.
Since tape recording a conversation without asking for consent IS entrapment and illegal
Its not entrapment (which is a kind of government misconduct in a criminal case that is not necessariyl linked to telephones at all), and its only illegal in some states (under federal law, only one parties consent is required for recording, though several states require both party's consent.)
Of course, that underscores a problem with the piece as advice to rely heavily on: in addition to being based on a not-current version of the regulations, it papers over the significant differences in law that may apply in different jurisdictions.
Now, there's an important point to make here, which is that the *economic incidence* of BOTH parts falls on the worker. That is, if corporations weren't made to match it, market wages would rise by that amount.
Well, that's a little crazy, a more sensible analysis would be that it is likely that most of teh burden falls on the worker, and that if the employer contribution were removed, market wages would rise by some amount less than the employer contribution and greater than 0.
Going through a small claims process to collect $500 is a hit or miss proposition for a pro se litigant. If you go to a lawyer, I am sure that he will find a way to recover triple that amount through a settlement.
If you find a lawyer who can routinely get defendants to settle for three times the maximum they could be held liable for in court, I'd be pretty surprised.
OTOH, if you are more interested in stopping the calls than trying to collect judgements, it may be more worthwhile to report matters to your state's attorney-general: states can, and most do, enforce this federal law, rather than forcing citizens to do private actions as their only recourse.
And most cases that are eligible for small claims are one's that you'd never see any money from if you could find a lawyer to take the case, because there isn't enough money involved to leave any for you if the lawyer gets enough to justify taking the case in the first place.
Actually, per the GPO's online site which claims to be current as of October, 30, 2006, 47 CFR 64.1200(d) reads:
(d) No person or entity shall initiate any call for telemarketing purposes to a residential telephone subscriber unless such person or entity has instituted procedures for maintaining a list of persons who request not to receive telemarketing calls made by or on behalf of that person or entity. The procedures instituted must meet the following minimum standards:
(1) Written policy. Persons or entities making calls for telemarketing purposes must have a written policy, available upon demand, for maintaining a do-not-call list.
(2) Training of personnel engaged in telemarketing. Personnel engaged in any aspect of telemarketing must be informed and trained in the existence and use of the do-not-call list.
(3) Recording, disclosure of do-not-call requests. If a person or entity making a call for telemarketing purposes (or on whose behalf such a call is made) receives a request from a residential telephone subscriber not to receive calls from that person or entity, the person or entity must record the request and place the subscriber's name, if provided, and telephone number on the do-not-call list at the time the request is made. Persons or entities making calls for telemarketing purposes (or on whose behalf such calls are made) must honor a residential subscriber's do-not-call request within a reasonable time from the date such request is made. This period may not exceed thirty days from the date of such request. If such requests are recorded or maintained by a party other than the person or entity on whose behalf the telemarketing call is made, the person or entity on whose behalf the telemarketing call is made will be liable for any failures to honor the do-not-call request. A person or entity making a call for telemarketing purposes must obtain a consumer's prior express permission to share or forward the consumer's request not to be called to a party other than the person or entity on whose behalf a telemarketing call is made or an affiliated entity.
(4) Identification of sellers and telemarketers. A person or entity making a call for telemarketing purposes must provide the called party with the name of the individual caller, the name of the person or entity on whose behalf the call is being made, and a telephone number or address at which the person or entity may be contacted. The telephone number provided may not be a 900 number or any other number for which charges exceed local or long distance transmission charges.
(5) Affiliated persons or entities. In the absence of a specific request by the subscriber to the contrary, a residential subscriber's do-not-call request shall apply to the particular business entity making the call (or on whose behalf a call is made), and will not apply to affiliated entities unless the consumer reasonably would expect them to be included given the identification of the caller and the product being advertised.
(6) Maintenance of do-not-call lists. A person or entity making calls for telemarketing purposes must maintain a record of a consumer's request not to receive further telemarketing calls. A do-not-call request must be honored for 5 years from the time the request is made.
(7) Tax-exempt nonprofit organizations are not required to comply with 64.1200(d).
The essay seems to be based on an inaccurate (perhaps because outdated) version of the regulations at issue; the provisions the article refers to being in 64.1200(d) are in 64.1200(b), the exception listed in 64.1200(c) is in part of 64.1200(a); the general gist is approximately the same, but the details are all mixed up.
Are claims in small claims court limited by complaint or by appearance?
Usually by filing (which I would call "complaint", but I'm not sure if you are using "complaint" to mean a single offense or a single filing, when contrasted with "appearance.)
Er, you only included an optimistic assessment of the time (and not costs!) it takes to get the judgement.
You failed to include the time and costs associated with collecting the judgement, which may well be non-negligible.
(I've also found that most phone spammers in fact give an identity up front; I usually hang up before I find out if "during or after" the message, they also provide a return phone number; so, factor in also the time cost of listening through all incoming phone spam to find the ones that do break the rules, rather than hanging up as soon as you recognize phone spam.)
If you are going to try to sue someone, I wouldn't rely on legal advice from someone who is apparently a non-lawyer and puts out a guide to suing on a federal law claim in small claims court that tries to make it seem open-and-shut simple. First, if you are going to sue in small claims court, and don't want to pay an attorney, you need to research the law governing the and procedures applicable to small claims court in your state: either going directly to the law, or (more friendly), one of the guides from reputable self-help legal publishers.
Second, I'd look into a better reference on the applicable law (again, you can go directly to the law, but if you are going to take someone else's word on interpretation without hiring a lawyer, again, go to a reputable source.) Its worth noting that if you check the official site, the regulations cited (47 CFR 64.1200) do not match the material quoted.
Its also important to note that the requirement for a the required identification and phone number is "during or after the message": if you want to do this, you've got to first listen to the whole message, and if they complied with the rules, there is nothing you can do to get back the time you wasted listening to the message.
Also, quite a few election-year messages are delivered by entities that exist and are created for the election, which may not have any remaining resources after the election, and may even be disbanded shortly afterward. While if you have a major claim against such an entity it might be worthwhile to do the work needed to try to attack the sponsors behind it, trying to do that to enforce a liability that (even with the triple award for "willful and knowing" violations) is only at most $1,500 (if you can't prove actual damages of over $500) is, well, likely to be a headache.
Its probably easier to report violations to your state authorities: state attorneys-general also have the right to bring actions, and if more people report violations, there is more they can do. And state attorneys-general have a lot more resources to conduct investigations, can claim the statutory damages for all violations by the targets of their suits, not just the one that was made to you—and because they can aggregate the claims, it makes the cost of litigation a lot more bearable for them. Get your tax moneys worth out of your state government, let them do the heavy lifting.
That being said, this message should serve as a good reminder that you do have the power for do-it-yourself enforcement here, though I wouldn't rely on this as a guide to how.
With much the same caveats that apply to the regular Wikipedia: that is, insofar as the information is linked to more regularly generated and reviewed source documents (in this case, though, classified ones), and if people in the community use it as a tool to get basic info on conclusions of the intelligence community, but go to the source information when its critical to get a good understanding.
It has the risk, though, like Wikipedia that people will use it without going to the source information, when the application is critical. Sometimes its better to know that you don't know than to think that you know when you don't have all the facts you should.
(Of course, since its a classified system of information sharing, and yet its being announced just before an election, there's also the possibility that there is not a lot of substance behind it, and its just a PR ploy to create the—conveniently unverifiable—impression that the party of the current administration is "doing something" to make things better.)
Well, since rumors from biased sources have always seemed to count as "news" under the/. definition, this doesn't seem to be that far below the standard.
At least is amusing, which is better than some of the other not-news that ends up here.
It makes sense, I suppose, if he doesn't know what the "K" in the memory listing in task manager is, and is just saying that the number to the left of it is 700,000.
If you want to play the kind of games that are the focus of the console market, that's a good idea; if you are into the kind of games that include some of the best selling PC games (like the Civ series, The Sims series, etc.), buying a console does you little good because console versions tend to lag far behind PC releases if they ever occur at all. And, of course, the console versions often lack capabilities that are in the PC versions, particularly as regards customizability and access to third-party content.
Unless you are a fps addict (read that a first-person-shooter or frames-per-second to taste) the games are probably better too.
FPS (in either sense) is hardly the only arena in which consoles tend to lag behind PCs in quality.
MacWorld reports that MySpace is going to start implementing audio fingerprinting to prevent copyrighted material from appearing on their site.
Which is clearly not true; anything subject to copyright is copyrighted simply by the act of creation, so unless "audio fingerprinting" can somehow identify that a work is a original creative work legally subject to copyright, it won't "prevent copyrighted material from appearing" anywhere. Even the slightly more detailed Gracenote press release (or perhaps the MySpace policy is referred to) seems confused about this.
It will prevent material which (according the matching algorithm used), "matches" material that is found in the "Gracenote Global Media Database". It supposedly will block "unauthorized copyrighted material", though the article isn't clear about any method to verify that the use is "unauthorized".
Why do people expect that codecs downloaded from arbitrary untrusted sources would be any less free of viruses, adware, etc... than any other random executables obtained off the net?
Probably because only a minority of users realize that a "codec" is a kind of "executable" or "program", rather than a some kind of electronic "key" or "description" that enables a media player to decode a particular kind of media file. Its not like the boundaries between safe (or at least, safer) "data" and dangerous "code" are always obvious to non-technical users.
Slashdot Mirror
The issue is not what can be taught on a laptop that can't be taught otherwise, but how the laptop acheives economy in teaching. For instance, compared to the books and consumable school supplies it can replace (delivering information is one of its tools), the OLPC system is inexpensive.
Well, yeah. Programming is an skill with quite a bit of value in the world market that doesn't require a lot of raw material or capital to create value; precisely the kind of thing that having access to the tools to learn and do could avenues for development in places where people aren't starving, but are trapped in persistent poverty.
1) The $300 pledge was an idea someone unconnected to OLPC came up with in an effort to get people to buy OLPC computers at above the price they were being sold to the recipient nations as a way of further subsidizing sales to developing nations.
2) Sure, the governments buying them could spend the money on food, medicine, shelter, and water purifying machines. However, those would do little to deal with the problems of education and information access that inhibit economic development. Presumably, the governments buying them have made a judgement that, in their current circumstances, there is more value in the investment in education and economic development that buying into OLPC represents than in spending that money in other places.
Billions of people in the developing world are neither starving nor suffering from dysentery.
Nor is OLPC billed as a panacea.
Nor is anyone suggesting it will magically do anything.
None of which are designed with the particular needs of developing nations in mind. The OLPC systems are, which is why Brazil, Argentina, Nigeria, Libya, and Thailand are already lined up to buy them.
The countries this is targetted at aren't nations where adequate aggregate food and water are major concerns, but ones where, despite famine not being a major problem, crushing poverty is a real problem, and lack of education and access to capital for most people stops them from escaping it. Just as microcredit programs have done much to encourage economic development with access to capital in many of these areas, inexpensive, ubiquitous computers provide a tool for education and information exchange that attacks another part of the economic problem. It also provides an avenue for information sharing that is, once the computers are distributed, difficult to centrally control, and therefore naturally increases pressure for responsive government by empowering the people.
Well, no one involved in the project has sold OLPC or the West more generally as the "end-all solution for everything", nor has anyone said that the recipient nations won't need to do anything additional to just buying the computers to get maximum value out of the project. Nevertheless Brazil, Argentina, Nigeria, Thailand, and Libya are already lined up for the laptops, and more countries are in discussions with OLPC.
No one is forcing developing nations to buy the laptops. So if this is just the loony West and its misguided ideas, you'd think the developing world would be turning OLPC away. That's not what's happening. Its nothing like England's efforts to civilize India by force, or any other type of colonialism. Its a free choice of the countries to participate, if they don't think its worth their resources, they simply say "no". No one is making it a precondition for, say, membership in in the WTO, access to World Bank or IMF funds, foreign aid, etc. There's nothing being used to push joining but the value to be derived from having the laptops.
1) Not all wrong things are, or should be, illegal.
2) I can see that an action bothers me, and still believe that it would be socially undesirable to try to address it through legislation.
3) I, therefore, there think its perfectly acceptable to complain about behavior without seeking to outlaw it.
6th Amendment rights apply only to criminal cases. Traffic violations are generally not criminal cases in the Constitutional sense, and 6th Amendment rights therefore often do not apply to them.
OTOH, one could make an argument that in a case like this, a 14th amendment due process violation occurred. Not quite the slam dunk that it would be if it was a criminal case and the 6th amendment could be invoked, though.
"Follow the rules, and those suing you are more likely to lose than they would be if you broke them" is more accurate. The idea that lawsuits can only happen to people when they've actually broken the law is, to say the least, wrong.
Voting systems vary quite a bit in the US; some places have used single-box voting for "party-line" voting, others haven't.
Its not entrapment (which is a kind of government misconduct in a criminal case that is not necessariyl linked to telephones at all), and its only illegal in some states (under federal law, only one parties consent is required for recording, though several states require both party's consent.)
Of course, that underscores a problem with the piece as advice to rely heavily on: in addition to being based on a not-current version of the regulations, it papers over the significant differences in law that may apply in different jurisdictions.
If you find a lawyer who can routinely get defendants to settle for three times the maximum they could be held liable for in court, I'd be pretty surprised.
OTOH, if you are more interested in stopping the calls than trying to collect judgements, it may be more worthwhile to report matters to your state's attorney-general: states can, and most do, enforce this federal law, rather than forcing citizens to do private actions as their only recourse.
And most cases that are eligible for small claims are one's that you'd never see any money from if you could find a lawyer to take the case, because there isn't enough money involved to leave any for you if the lawyer gets enough to justify taking the case in the first place.
The essay seems to be based on an inaccurate (perhaps because outdated) version of the regulations at issue; the provisions the article refers to being in 64.1200(d) are in 64.1200(b), the exception listed in 64.1200(c) is in part of 64.1200(a); the general gist is approximately the same, but the details are all mixed up.
Well, it lets you soom them in US courts for actions that are illegal in the US that have an illegal effect in the US; lots of laws do that.
Though actually enforcing a judgement in such a case may be costly and difficult.
Usually by filing (which I would call "complaint", but I'm not sure if you are using "complaint" to mean a single offense or a single filing, when contrasted with "appearance.)
Er, you only included an optimistic assessment of the time (and not costs!) it takes to get the judgement.
You failed to include the time and costs associated with collecting the judgement, which may well be non-negligible.
(I've also found that most phone spammers in fact give an identity up front; I usually hang up before I find out if "during or after" the message, they also provide a return phone number; so, factor in also the time cost of listening through all incoming phone spam to find the ones that do break the rules, rather than hanging up as soon as you recognize phone spam.)
If you are going to try to sue someone, I wouldn't rely on legal advice from someone who is apparently a non-lawyer and puts out a guide to suing on a federal law claim in small claims court that tries to make it seem open-and-shut simple. First, if you are going to sue in small claims court, and don't want to pay an attorney, you need to research the law governing the and procedures applicable to small claims court in your state: either going directly to the law, or (more friendly), one of the guides from reputable self-help legal publishers.
Second, I'd look into a better reference on the applicable law (again, you can go directly to the law, but if you are going to take someone else's word on interpretation without hiring a lawyer, again, go to a reputable source.) Its worth noting that if you check the official site, the regulations cited (47 CFR 64.1200) do not match the material quoted.
Its also important to note that the requirement for a the required identification and phone number is "during or after the message": if you want to do this, you've got to first listen to the whole message, and if they complied with the rules, there is nothing you can do to get back the time you wasted listening to the message.
Also, quite a few election-year messages are delivered by entities that exist and are created for the election, which may not have any remaining resources after the election, and may even be disbanded shortly afterward. While if you have a major claim against such an entity it might be worthwhile to do the work needed to try to attack the sponsors behind it, trying to do that to enforce a liability that (even with the triple award for "willful and knowing" violations) is only at most $1,500 (if you can't prove actual damages of over $500) is, well, likely to be a headache.
Its probably easier to report violations to your state authorities: state attorneys-general also have the right to bring actions, and if more people report violations, there is more they can do. And state attorneys-general have a lot more resources to conduct investigations, can claim the statutory damages for all violations by the targets of their suits, not just the one that was made to you—and because they can aggregate the claims, it makes the cost of litigation a lot more bearable for them. Get your tax moneys worth out of your state government, let them do the heavy lifting.
That being said, this message should serve as a good reminder that you do have the power for do-it-yourself enforcement here, though I wouldn't rely on this as a guide to how.
With much the same caveats that apply to the regular Wikipedia: that is, insofar as the information is linked to more regularly generated and reviewed source documents (in this case, though, classified ones), and if people in the community use it as a tool to get basic info on conclusions of the intelligence community, but go to the source information when its critical to get a good understanding.
It has the risk, though, like Wikipedia that people will use it without going to the source information, when the application is critical. Sometimes its better to know that you don't know than to think that you know when you don't have all the facts you should.
(Of course, since its a classified system of information sharing, and yet its being announced just before an election, there's also the possibility that there is not a lot of substance behind it, and its just a PR ploy to create the—conveniently unverifiable—impression that the party of the current administration is "doing something" to make things better.)
Well, since rumors from biased sources have always seemed to count as "news" under the /. definition, this doesn't seem to be that far below the standard.
At least is amusing, which is better than some of the other not-news that ends up here.
It makes sense, I suppose, if he doesn't know what the "K" in the memory listing in task manager is, and is just saying that the number to the left of it is 700,000.
If you want to play the kind of games that are the focus of the console market, that's a good idea; if you are into the kind of games that include some of the best selling PC games (like the Civ series, The Sims series, etc.), buying a console does you little good because console versions tend to lag far behind PC releases if they ever occur at all. And, of course, the console versions often lack capabilities that are in the PC versions, particularly as regards customizability and access to third-party content.
FPS (in either sense) is hardly the only arena in which consoles tend to lag behind PCs in quality.
Only on slashdot are women decribed as "equipment".
Which is clearly not true; anything subject to copyright is copyrighted simply by the act of creation, so unless "audio fingerprinting" can somehow identify that a work is a original creative work legally subject to copyright, it won't "prevent copyrighted material from appearing" anywhere. Even the slightly more detailed Gracenote press release (or perhaps the MySpace policy is referred to) seems confused about this.
It will prevent material which (according the matching algorithm used), "matches" material that is found in the "Gracenote Global Media Database". It supposedly will block "unauthorized copyrighted material", though the article isn't clear about any method to verify that the use is "unauthorized".
Probably because only a minority of users realize that a "codec" is a kind of "executable" or "program", rather than a some kind of electronic "key" or "description" that enables a media player to decode a particular kind of media file. Its not like the boundaries between safe (or at least, safer) "data" and dangerous "code" are always obvious to non-technical users.