I would highly recommend reading Roger Gentis's work, especially maybe "Les murs de l'asile".
It's quite old indeed, but still very interesting.

This is what I came for when I've read low-speed...
I have a better bandwith here than your 56k modem, but not that much (usually around 20 ko/s).

The technical solutions on your link are interesting, but a bit more extreme that what I would need.
Actually, I'm particularly interested in understanding what's non-optimal in bandwith allowance and usage (both from the tower to my computer, and inside my computer, between applications).
There are some behaviours (pages refusing to load at random times) that show that the problem is not only poor bandwith, but bad usage of it too.

Asimow was a jew.
Jewish intellectuals have a sense of community and an ethic of responsability*, and so loyalty towards humanity and the general good trumps loyalty to the state or the corporation.
So Asimov imagined a future where engineers would have an ethic of responsability and some sort of loyalty towards humanity.
That's the reason for the Three Laws being unrelevant to the actual world.


(*) Non-zionist ones at least.

What seems to be the situation is that for ten years, the Brazil government did not want to buy american jets, but had not enough power to say a definitive "no" to such a "caring friend" as the American government.
Now the Snowden scandal gives Rousseff a good reason to go for the better plane without risking too much of political backlash from both US governement and Boing and US Army friends in Brazil.

It seems that the real problem is that allowing people to share creation freely would end in people actually choosing what they want to watch and read.
Which would mean that Big Entertainment would not anymore being able to force-feed product-placement crap through false choice like "Ow my balls!" on Channel 1 and "Ouch my thingies!" on Channel 2.
Which would be not only the end of Big Entertainement, but the end too of consumer-driven capitalism, which works well towards an idiocracy-like utopia only because the consumers are advertisement-driven.

If you don't control anymore what the people watch and read, you lose control both of what people think and of what they buy (they might even think before buying - oh the humanity!), so it's the end of civilisation as we know it.

And some people consider that the content-owners should die a painful death and let the content-makers and content-users find together a honest way to keep creation flowing...

There's an interesting explanation at the end of Dennis Lehane's "Sacred": basically, because you could not live on what you actually produce, so you have to steal your income from other people and other countries.
Stealing from poor people on a long-term basis cannot be established without submitting them to a reign of terror, so you end living in fear of them retaliating somehow.

Getting the measles is a vaccine, so what's wrong with that?

Interesting article on French site Reflets on this topic...
The Korean candidate seems like amateur work comparing to what can be done with such modern technology.

It's not a problem, it's a solution...

The problem would be getting rid of the people who try to trick other human beings back in unhealthy eating habits.

I didn't actually believe it either when I first saw it on Slashdot.

And then I read the webcomic Namesake, and went to Wikipedia to check one thing about Alice Liddel which was featured on the webcomic (which is very good by the way, and is quite famous now).
I noticed that there was a section of the wikipedia notice called "Alice Liddel in fiction" and which didn't feature Namesake, so I added Namesake.

It was immediately reverted, citing "no link".

So I reverted the revert and added a link.
It was immediately reverted.

I reverted the revert and went to the user page of the reverter, asking the reason of his vandalism. He actually answered me in quite a polite way, with bad arguments, and reverted again.

You can guess that an average Wikipedia user will not go so far (I usually don't even check that my inputs are not reverted), so yes these people are actually destroying public participation in wikipedia, slowly but surely.

Actually and as Marshall Brain's "Manna" has demonstrated, the real threat is not some fantasy AI supercomputer but human beings learning to leave their decisions to algorithms and then obey said algorithms...

Well, if drunks were more responsible, there wouldn't be a need for booze buses in the first place...
Or maybe they are responsible persons that happen to be at the moment, well, a bit drunk?

In the mid-eighties France launched a big program to give all schools Thomson PC computers (making people joke about computer helped education: in France it was the education which helped computer industry - Thomson being a state-owned industry at the time).
Without any real thought about how to use them in schools nor teachers' involvement in the decision making, nor even a real formation effort for the teachers themselves, most computers ended on shelves and it was one of the big failures of the old-style socialist government.

Though, many Freinet schools did (at the time and much more after the start of the internet) bring computers in the classroom - AFTER careful thinking and experiments about what they can be used for - and they had (and still have) extraordinary results.


So yes, stupid decisions are stupid. And you don't fix bad teachers by giving them more tools to be bad with.

That doesn't mean that technology isn't of any use in school.

That's called "autogestion", is what Saul Alinsky's work was all about, and I'm not sure that Tea Party is really embracing it.