What containers? /waves arm like jedi mind-trick

Obama is raping and murdering and torturing thousands of his own citizens, committing acts of Genocide worse than any dictator ever before.

That's a pretty tall order. The Germans managed something like 6 million and Stalin something like 7 million. Pol Pot didn't reach those nominal figures but on a percentage of total population he probably outdid both, killing something like 1 in 3.

Are you really sure Obama has exceeded 6 million dead via outright acts of genocide, excluding combat against armed adversaries?

Too many games are sold for free and/or $0.99 yet to be playable require in app purchases to be at all playable.

I closely control what games my 9 year old can play and review them before we buy them and its impossible to tell which ones will be worth a damn without blowing another $10 in in-app purchases to make them playable. I reject games with what look like too-many in-app purchases, and he doesn't have the ability to make those purchases.

Too often I wind up with a very frustrated 9 year old who's upset that he can't win/progress because the game basically requires in-app purchases to be playable for any length of time.

I don't know if there's a very workable solution, but I think devs should be required to clear notification that "advancement or continued play in this game requires in app purchases; the total cost of this game exceeds its initial purchase price."

Unfortunately the app-store economics were built around the "99 cent" app and apparently its either not viable to make a decent title at that price point nor is it possible to get the sales volume for $5.99 games that actually offer playability when you're competing against a sea of nominal 99 cent games.

It's also just wrong. From 3G onwards phones authenticate the cell towers. Even with a full stack running you wouldn't be easily able to force a phone to associate to your tower, at least not without jamming all the other towers in your vicinity.

For example, scaling the network up to 2000 transactions per second would result in a Bitcoin node downloading about 1 MB per second. No big deal, until you realize that means each node will need about 2.6 TB of bandwidth each month, and that's just to handle the needs of 10% of the population of the United States, assuming 5 transactions per person per day.

As pointed out by another poster, 2.6 TB of transfer quota per month is trivial even by today's standards: anyone can afford that. And should Bitcoin ever scale to those levels it won't be relying on today's resources, it'll be relying on tomorrow's. So your own example falls apart almost immediately.

Also, rather than just guessing what the US population "needs" why not take a look at existing networks? 2000tps is about a fifth of VISA traffic for the whole world. Of course not every transaction goes via VISA, but it should indicate to you that maybe your numbers are once again a bit sketchy.

You can read an article I wrote a long time ago here: http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability. It goes over the various ways the system scales up. Performance is unintuitive, there's no substitute for just working it out on the back of an envelope. Bear in mind we live in a world where single websites can generate a large fraction of total internet traffic and not go bankrupt.

no....
If OLPC wants a new mission, it should be to develop FREE educational software that runs on standard Android tablets.

Sure. They give away all the software they write already, and I assumed that they would give away any Android software they write. It seemed so obvious that I didn't feel the need to put in the word "free" but I guess I should have. Thanks for the comment.

one of the largest problems is that there are not a lot of books printed in the languages of 3rd world countries. and absolutely no advanced education texts.

I agree. IMHO that is the "killer app" for the OLPC devices, or for Android tablets. It's great that they can run software, but it's essential that they serve as textbook reading devices.

I think the ultimate educational tool for developing countries would be a ruggedized Android tablet with an e-ink screen. Color is a nice-to-have rather than essential, and the dramatic increase in battery life would be the win.

This suggests another idea for OLPC's future: they could make a deal with Amazon and ship a customized Kindle e-ink reader. Or maybe make a deal to ship a customized Nook. But either way, ride the coattails of a company that already spent the R&D and focus just on adding educational software.

I disagree with your analogy in which you compare stealing a car with patent grabbing.

Um, no. I said that stealing a car with the keys inside is still stealing; despite the fact that the car owner "enabled" the theft by being careless with the keys.

In the same way, being a jerk with patents is being a jerk, despite the fact that the USPTO "enables" patent jerks by granting patents that should not be granted.

Even if Apple were to have freed every one of their smartphone inventions, there would still be lawyers arguing that those inventions are not comprehensive, that their client has patents that fall between the gaps.

Your language loads the question here. You presuppose that Apple "invented" everything that they patented; I think some of it has prior art, some of it is obvious (like the patent on dialing a number by touching the number on the touchscreen), and some of it is probably genuinely new and interesting but by now I'm predisposed to assume Apple is a jerk.

And as for your main point, you are simply mistaken. If Apple had not patented anything, but just made a public demo of the iPhone, nobody would be able to file a patent after that and use the patent to hammer Apple. Apple's iPhone would now be prior art. If you disagree, please post some sort of reference to any example that would disprove this idea.

I work at an IP company, and it has been hammered into me not to disclose anything that might be patentable, because once the idea has been publicly disclosed, it becomes not patentable. I'm not a lawyer of course.

the analogy here is a defense system vs having weapons of your own.

I understand the possible use of patents as a defense. For example, Google: I am not aware of any case where Google tried to shut down a competitor using patents. This despite the fact that they own many patents.

However, Apple has been trying to use patents to prevent Samsung from selling phones. I have a problem with that.

you can't blame one company for doing it in a world in which everyone has the bomb.

Um, the whole point of my comment is that I do blame one company for doing this. I blame Apple, I blame Microsoft, I blame any company that is getting egregiously bad patents and enforcing them.

I agree.

If OLPC wants a new mission, it should be to develop educational software that runs on standard Android tablets.

You can buy "white box" Android tablets at amazingly cheap prices because they are mass-produced in China. While these tablets fall short of the ideal devices imagined by OLPC, there is absolutely no way for OLPC to get their costs down to match.

You can buy at least three Android tablets for the cost of one OLPC device. You could bundle tablets with a keyboard, a carrying case, and maybe a solar panel, and still massively undercut the OLPC's custom hardware.

Cheap Android tablet's don't have great battery life. But I bought one of the original XO-1 laptops and it only had a few hours of battery life, so clearly OLPC must consider even the limited battery life of a cheap tablet to be sufficient.

One of the nifty things about the OLPC custom design is that it's easy to repair. But with the massive cost advantage of a generic Android tablet, whole spare tablets could be shipped.

The promise of Sugar never was realized. For example, one of the reasons I bought an XO-1 laptop was that I was excited by the thought of the "show source" key, where you were supposed to be able to go anywhere in the system, hit the "show source" key, and find some kind of editable Python source code you could tweak. I never did find any source to tweak before I gave away my laptop. (It's in India now!)

Another part of the OLPC custom hardware was the "mesh" networking, which aimed to make it possible for multiple students to cooperatively share limited networking resources. Did that ever actually get used? All the photos I have seen show students in classrooms, and if the classroom has WiFi then an Android tablet would work fine. If the "mesh" networking is valuable, then maybe OLPC should invest in a one-off gadget that just does that, and plugs into the USB port on an Android tablet.

The problem with a "solution" here is there's no way to know how the data is organized.

I'd say any relatively hack-free solution will involve a commercial backup application and a storage array of sufficient size to handle at least one full backup and some chain of incrementals.

Ideally the backup array would be of sufficient size and disk count that you could gain some small protection by creating independent disk groups each capable of each holding an independent file system for a full plus backup chains. I say this having supported large backup arrays where monolithic file systems were created only to corrupt, causing the entire backup to be useless. It doesn't protect against failures caused by faulty array controllers or enclosure failure, but nothing does but multiple complete arrays.

Decent commercial backup software will make the job simpler with compression, deduplication, intelligent incremental management, cataloging, etc.

CDW says $9,000 will get you a Netgear ReadyNAS with 12x4TB disk. In RAID-10, you'd have 24TB to work with. Combined with decent backup software this would result in a fairly painless way to backup that much data and manage it.

If you had nothing but time on your hands, you could roll your own solution with rsync, de-duped ZFS, etc but the hardware piece is still not cheap and rolling your own is nearly as expensive with a lot more headache.