You made me immediately think on the poor Lemmings looking at the decreasing counter on the top of their heads, only to grab their heads in distress upon reaching zero... Exploding in a gory feast of blood, leaving their poor mammal corpse for their brethen to remind them of their probable fate.
One of the cruelest games in game history. But, yes, one of the best ones as well.
Oh, come on... I have also lost several items only to find them later, misplaced in the most obvious places. Of course, I have also attributed to theft some of my losses. I guess that I have misplaced my stuff more than once.
So, if thieves were to end up with a useless brick, would people lose less phones?
Do thieves only get phones to resell them (and not, say, take your contacts information, for blackmail and similar stuff?) In my country, there have been countless campaigns telling people not to fall for anybody saying "I have your daughter kidnapped", because they are most usually bluffing (and demanding for expedited money transfers, to which many distressed parents comply without first checking)
I seriously seriously doubt this US$580 million figure would be in any significant way reduced
(...)to say Ray Kurtzweil is just some "foolish expert" is to be utterly clueless (...) he probably did more before breakfast this morning then you will achieve in your entire life.
You mean, like having some nice morning sex? Given the Slashdot famed population statistics, you might be just right.
In the 1860s, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay allied in a war against Paraguay. This war caused the death of ~60% of the Paraguayan population, including ~90% of its adult males. The social effects are still present today, over 140 years later: The country is the most machist in Latin America (which is not an easy feat!), because it became not only normal but positive for a man to have several women. Of course, it also destroyed Paraguayan economy, and to this day, Paraguay is the poorest country in South America.
Of course, this says very little of what would happen by killing all mosquito males or females. But since when does a Slashdot discussion need to stay on topic?
Please note that "a woman" for the Slashdot demographics most likely includes "mom", and up to a certain point of demographics, "granny". Besides that... I doubt most aunts would trust Slashdotters' color sensibility. I mean... Just look at your desktop!
Expanding a bit from my previous post: Of course, interested kids will get their RPi going, and might end up making magic, just as many of us did with our 8-bit machines 25 years ago. However, the bar the OLPC set to itself was quite different — And might I say, much higher: To come up with a {product, system} that's made for kids. For all kids. To help them to learn about everything, not just about how to do I/O with a computer. An operating environment that's tailored to a constructuvist view of education, allowing them to (easily) understand what's going on in the programs — But even if they don't want to, give them a wide array of programs to hand-hold them through the whole educational process.
Not by far the same task. Both RPi and OLPC set on for extraordinary tasks. But their targets are very far from each other.
Cheap it is, granted. And yes, its inceptors do (try to) target it at the educational market. I have in fact spotted several RPi machines at my university. However, getting a RPi usable to be part of a general science project is quite far from trivial. Yes, given its easily accessible GPIO, it's close to ideal. But basic and high school teachers rarely know enough to get a RPi to boot, don't even mention to control or monitor outside events.
If you read it any less historically, the odds to what GP refer get lesser and lesser.
In Mexico, at least, shopping in the known ideologically-green stores is often much more expensive than in regular chain stores (i.e. Walmart and the like). I buy most of my fresh food in the street markets, and it is both quite cheaper than chain stores and of better quality (i.e. food lasts longer, there is a wide range of product qualities on different price points for each produce, etc.)
Now, there are *some* producer-direct organic outlets which are quite cheap, and with great quality... But of course, it's not so easy to get to them (they are often in the countryside, for obvious reasons, and my city is quite big for me to leave it every week or two).
And Chileans do know at least a bit of chilli (unlike their Argentinian neighbours). But barely enough. Their food is thankfully quite tasty by itself. But, as a Mexican, being in Chile and not being able to find any real chilli... Was quite odd.
Nothing like texting "hey beautiful! Good morning!" to your "loved ones" group at 7PM!
A friend did a quite decent analysis on Telegram's shortcomings regarding what they offer:
http://blog.tincho.org/posts/T...
He points at this second article, that strongly criticizes Telegram's supposedly strong, proprietary crypto:
There is a file called documents/My Clippings.txt if I'm not mistaken. Some time ago, I wrote a simple program (kindleclip — https://github.com/gwolf/kindl... ) that presents you highlights, bookmarks and comments, allows you to search, either by book or by date. It's a GTK2 project built with Glade however, and I have not yet ported it to use current alternatives, but at least I believe the source to be quite readable/followable. Hope you find it useful.
Actually... No.
I got my first Acer (marketed in Mexico under the "Printaform" brand, but manuals were all branded Acer) in 1987. The Acer 5201/5203 (single- or double- floppy drives) were quite popular here in Mexico by then.
"Simple" PC clones, built on a passive ISA backplane. The motherboard was just a "special" ISA card with the CPU and the 256KB of RAM in it. First expansion slot had a CGA card, second expansion card was the I/O controller, and it had one free port (to which I eventually hooked up a MFM controller and knew the bliss of having a hard drive).
No, it won't make much sense even with that in mind. Even less, in fact.
Embedded systems are usually factory-installed. In the factory, they don't do the installs via floppies. Most OpenBSD installs today are done off their (very good!) CD-ROM media, or maybe even more, by USB.
Floppy disks are used for a tiny percentage of installs (yes, even of *their* installs). Alright, they don't want to dump very old architectures that are known to work and have no other acceptable bood medium, but in the end... Basing the entire OS in the least common denominator takes a toll on the general usability of the system in everyday settings.
It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.
