"I can write this in a slow, OO language using OPM (other people's modules) and it'll be quick to target, bug free, lightweight, and fast. Because, uh, faster hardware and, uh, derp" Also, "I don't need to learn C, I have (fill in the blank with the latest fad language that purports to save programmers from having to really learn to program)" and also "I can use the (fill in the blank with the latest agile / tricky / ultra-testable) technique to Make My Code Shine!"

Oh yeah, and this charmer: "I don't have to bugfix version-2 or older, it's perfectly reasonable to expect everyone to upgrade."

It tells me that there are people out there who will openly admit to using their children as metaphorical weapons in a war on other groups of people.

The 50% drop was self reported by the officers. In other words, the officers themselves self reported using force around half as often as before. Reports of abusive cops drops 90% though, so your point still stands, just not in the context of this particular thread.

Your explanation is a possible one, but it is not the only one.

A) The general public would know about the initiative. Being recorded works both ways, it makes everyone think about their actions more, cops and civilians alike.
B) It's possible that the video encourages cops to be more polite and less aggressive because they know the video has their back if something gets out of hand.
C) It's possible that the video encourages cops to be more polite and less aggressive because they are more likely to get in trouble for it if they step out of line.

Personally, if I had to guess, I'd bet that most of the change comes from B, though indirectly. I'd be willing to pay money that the first few days with the camera officers were extremely self conscious about their actions, less aggressive and more polite in their interactions. I'm guessing the cops saw how much easier and safer their jobs can be by being less aggressive and confrontational.

Did you actually click the link? If anything the paid results are more obvious in my opinion. There's a bright yellow icon marking them out explicitly as "ADS" versus a light grey border labeled euphemistically "sponsored results". This is, at most, a step to the side, not a step backwards.

Google has an easy way of verifying that the account holder or someone authorized by them is using the phone: require the password. If you don't want to require the password every purchase and want to have a 30 minute grace period after each password entry, put an active notification in the notification bar with a countdown and a way to manually leave the grace period.

Yes, and that would be fraud: deception intended to result in financial or personal gain.

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.

Apple is not the problem. The patent system is.

Can't we agree that both are?

If you leave your car with the keys in the ignition, then it is partially your fault when someone climbs in and drives away. However, the person who stole the car is also to blame. It's not a valid defense to say "He left his keys in the car so it wasn't stealing."

If all Apple wanted was to make sure nobody else got patents on all this UI stuff, they simply could have fully published the details of how their phone worked, and nobody filing after that would be able to claim to have invented it. And I'm not a lawyer but I think Steve Jobs's public "one more thing" demos would have sufficed to make all those UI features unpatentable by anyone else.

But that wasn't enough for Apple. "Patented!" crowed Steve Jobs. Apple patented everything they thought they could get away with, including totally obvious stuff like squishing your fingers together to make things get smaller on the screen, and spreading your fingers wide to make things get bigger on the screen. Come on, that is totally obvious and there even was prior art on it. So we return to where we started: the USPTO is a problem because it let Apple patent obvious stuff, but Apple is part of the problem for trying to patent obvious stuff. (Fortunately the "pinch-to-zoom" patent was in fact invalidated, due to Samsung winning in court against Apple!)

Samsung is going to go scorched earth on this new lawsuit. Millions for defense and not one cent for tribute. And Samsung has the millions. I hope Samsung wins big and invalidates all of Apple's patents.

(And then, as long as I'm dreaming, Samsung can go invalidate Microsoft's mobile patents next.)

They have a website devoted to this:

http://www.foldscope.com/

And the news on the web site is that they will give away 10,000 of these to people who volunteer to test them. If you think you could do a good job of testing, maybe you should sign up.

http://www.foldscope.com/#/10ksignup/

To me, the most impressive part is that he claims they have very accurate focusing. I believe he said "micron" focusing. I'm not sure how that works, but the paper is cut to a very accurate shape (the video showed some sort of computer-controlled cutter, it might even have been a laser cutter). By moving a tab I guess the paper can be made to flex predictably to focus the lens?

I got four letters for you:J-U-R-Y

I got some letters for you, too: Voir dire. This is the process wherein lawyers weed out all your peers in favor of compliant idiots. That's not what it's supposed to do, of course, but that's how it's used. It's then almost always followed by admonishment by the judge to the effect that the jury has to apply the law as written, with nothing at all about the jury's actual duty to evaluate the law -- in fact, if that's brought up, likely you'll have a mistrial.

If you go to court in the US, you can pretty much look forward to success in ratio with the money you spend on your lawyer, and how well your lawyer manages to pass that largesse along to the judge. And too bad if the judge thinks public opinion means more than your money.

Someone here doesn't keep up with philosophy.

A good deal of philosophy is mythology, trendy mythology, which is why I tend to ignore the signals coming from that direction. It's not even a soft science: it's not science at all. So yes, you're quite right, and thank you for noticing I'm not taking part in that mostly-bewildered sideshow.

There is nothing -- repeat, absolutely nothing -- to indicate, in any way, that there is anything going on in brains that isn't mundane physics. Further, not anywhere in the body, not anywhere in the world, not anywhere in the entire universe. The tendency of certain personality types to attribute the unknown to various imaginary basics without bothering with objective fact, measurable cause and effect, and the inconvenience of presenting a falsifiable proposal is what got us gods, elves, banshees, ghosts, chupacabras, and so forth.

Me, I'll wait to assert that force X is making something happen until someone demonstrates that there is a force X. In the interim, we already know the living brain is replete with electrical, chemical and physical activity (by which I mean the actual physical configuration is known to change over time... I'm not just talking about niceties like oxygen transport.) We don't know what it all does in any kind of holistic sense; that makes it far too early to be presuming the existence of further activity of another order. If, however, we look into all the known activities and find that they cannot account for the end result, that's the time to look further -- that, or if someone builds an X detector and demonstrates that X is, in fact, going on -- as it were. I must point out to you that no such thing has occurred.

In the interim, the way to bet is clearly that it's all mundane, in the sense that we already understand the underlying physics principles. Everything from Occam's Razor to basic statistics tells us the probable solution lies in the set of solutions we've determined describe everything else; for one, we know of nothing else, for another, there's no evidence whatsoever that points to something else. There's simply no path from here to Dualism. Chalmer's assertions are baseless at this point in time, as they were when made. There's simply no evidence for consciousness as "it's own thing"; it exists in the mundane world, odds are that it is of the mundane world -- just like everything else we've ever looked into.

c'mon. Every indication says your brain is you. Chemical reactions, electrical impulses, stored states, massive, active and dynamic connectivity. That's what "you" arise from. When your brain stops, you stop. Your head contains a most effective EM shield consisting of wet, conductive layers that are sufficient to prevent huge RF and EM fields from getting into your brain tissue. The tiny, minuscule events going on inside your head can't get out under any circumstance for the same reason, unless you (a) punch a hole in your skull or (b) scan it with instruments so sensitive you can hardly comprehend the idea, or (c), you effectuate your mind's activity in some manner by moving your body via the nerves that connect your muscles and other parts to the brain through the base of your skull. Your brain is not an interface. Your brain is the computer. Everything we know about physics points this way; nothing points the way you suggest. It's simply not the way to bet. What you're talking about has basis only in mythology at this point in time.