Saturday, October 20, 2007

Pogue on the XO

David Pogue reviewed the XO from One Laptop Per Child a couple weeks ago and I am the last blogger in the world to have read it. Actually, I didn’t even. Instead I listened today to the last of his podcasts (too busy with TV he says ).

The review is a rave:

[T]he bloggers and the ignorant have already begun to spit on the XO laptop. “Dude, for $400, I can buy a real Windows laptop,” they say.

Clearly, the XO’s mission has sailed over these people’s heads like a 747.

The truth is, the XO laptop, now in final testing, is absolutely amazing, and in my limited tests, a total kid magnet. Both the hardware and the software exhibit breakthrough after breakthrough - some of them not available on any other laptop, for $400 or $4,000.

In the places where the XO will be used, power is often scarce. So the laptop uses a new battery chemistry, called lithium ferro-phosphate. It runs at one-tenth the temperature of a standard laptop battery, costs $10 to replace, and is good for 2,000 charges - versus 500 on a regular laptop battery.

The laptop consumes an average of 2 watts, compared with 60 or more on a typical business laptop. That’s one reason it gets such great battery life. A small yo-yo-like pull-cord charger is available (one minute of pulling provides 10 minutes of power); so is a $12 solar panel that, although only one foot square, provides enough power to recharge or power the machine.

Speaking of bright sunshine: the XO’s color screen is bright and, at 200 dots an inch, razor sharp (1,200 by 900 pixels). But it has a secret identity: in bright sun, you can turn off the backlight altogether. The resulting display, black on light gray, is so clear and readable, it’s almost like paper. Then, of course, the battery lasts even longer.

The XO offers both regular wireless Internet connections and something called mesh networking, which means that all the laptops see each other, instantly, without any setup - even when there’s no Internet connection.

With one press of a button, you see a map. Individual XO logos - color-coded to differentiate them - represent other laptops in the area; you connect with one click. (You never double-click in the XO’s visual, super-simple operating system. You either point with the mouse or click once.)

I’m calling Consumer Affairs on Newegg

Remember I bought a 32” flat panel for under $500? That price included a $50 rebate. Look at the date (for those who don’t want to bother with the clickthrough, May 27, 2007). Here’s the status right now:

It’s going on five months now and they’re still telling me the same thing!!! I’ve about had it. I will register my complaint with the Governor’s Office of Consumer Affairs and the Attorney General’s Office.

I know that there is no law… Their ought to be…

How about a time limit. 90 days? With a penalty. On 91 days I get 150%, on 120 days I get 200%. If not that, then how about that vendors must publish a promised by date?

To those of you who say these obligations are heavy-handed government intrusion that will kill the practice of rebates I answer: SO BE IT!

On sex offender registries: do they work?

The focus of the AJC opinion piece today is the injustice of saddling teens with damning label for life but the title of the 2 part series is “Registry without reason.” In it we learn:

Federal law requires states to create registries of offenders convicted of sex crimes or offenses against children. It also requires local law enforcement agencies to provide information to schools, day care centers and parents about sex offenders living in the community. In Georgia, sheriff’s offices publish the photos of newly registered offenders in their jurisdictions in their local newspapers, and the GBI maintains a registry of all offenders.

However, 22 states, including Georgia, have gone further by imposing residency or work limits on offenders on the registry. Of those, Georgia’s law is among the most extreme. [...]

Just last year, the General Assembly again tightened the restrictions. Previous law had barred sex offenders from living or loitering within 1,000 feet of schools, day care centers, parks, rec centers or skating rinks. The 2006 law added churches, swimming pools and school bus stops to that list.

For the first time, the new law also barred sex offenders from holding jobs within 1,000 feet of schools, child care centers or churches.

So do these registries work? In June David Giacalone put together the most impressive collection of resources I’ve found:

You can find a very good discussion of issues presented by the residency restrictions on sex offenders by Lior Strahilevitz and many commentors at PrawfsBlawg’s “Sex Offender Residency Restrictions and the Right to Live Where You Want,” Aug. 3, 2005, and Michael Cernovich reviews many of the relevant legal issues at Crime & Federalsim, in his posting Doe v. Miller: The Legal Theories.  Residency restrictions have been in the news a lot recently, and have been covered well by Corey Rayburn Yung at Sex Crimes (e.g., here), and by Prof. Douglas A. Berman, at Sentencing Law and Policy weblog.  Last year, Prof. Berman pointed to “A potent and important prosecutorial statement against sex offender residency restrictions” (Feb. 9, 2006).  The document was released by the Iowa County Attorneys Association, an organization of county prosecutors seeking “to promote the uniform and efficient administration of the criminal justice system.” In its five-page statement ICAA explains that Iowa’s broad sex offender residency restriction “does not provide the protection that was originally intended and that the cost of enforcing the requirement and the unintended effects on families of offenders warrant replacing the restriction with more effective protective measure.” [...]

For further reading on this topic, I suggest:

1. An important amicus brief to the Ohio Supreme Court, which is quoted at length in the Sex Crimes posting “Amicus Brief in Challenge to Ohio Residency Restrictions” (June 5, 2007).  Among many cogent points, the brief argues that “the Ohio statute may increase the risk of recidivism by forcing many sex offenders to move from supportive environments that reduce the offenders’ risk of re-offending. See, e.g., JOAN PETERSILIA, WHEN PRISONERS COME HOME: PAROLE AND PRISONER REENTRY (2003) (concluding that positive social support is critical to the success of released offenders.).”

2. The Sun Sentinel article “Offender fights Palm Beach County ordinance: Tough laws limit where they can live, but critics doubt their effectiveness (June 3, 2007).

3. The Newsday story, “Residency laws for sex offenders under microscope:
Restrictions aim to prevent repeat crimes, but critics say all laws do is prevent offenders from rebuilding lives,” Dec. 2, 2006.

4. “More limits on sex offenders won’t help, advocate tells board,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 7, 2007, covering the consideration of residency restrictions in Wentzville, MO.

5. [update: June 14, 2007] “Patchwork of sex offender laws leads to confusion,” CapitalNews 9 [Albany, NY], June 13, 2007.

6. “Montgomery County reacting to Schenectady sex offender restrictions,” WNYT.com, June 14, 2007. [”We’ll take a look at what we have here on the books already, do an assessment in order to keep them from making a mass exodus from Schenectady County or any other county into our county,” said Tom DiMezza, chairman of the Board of Supervisors.] And, “Sex offender says he has no place left to go,” WNYT.com, June 14, 2007 (focus on Richard Matthews, a registered sex offender living in Scotia, NY).

From the Gatehouse News two day sex offender project in August, “The number of sex offense arrests has actually increased in six of the 14 states that have enacted laws telling sex offenders where to live.”

Also note, Pennsylvania has half the number of sex offenders per capita as Georgia and the lowest of any state. Pennsylvania has passed no state law.

Sex laws gone awry: teenagers punished for common acts

In the first of two parts, the AJC says it’s unjust to saddle teens with damning label for life:

Federal law requires states to create registries of offenders convicted of sex crimes or offenses against children. It also requires local law enforcement agencies to provide information to schools, day care centers and parents about sex offenders living in the community. In Georgia, sheriff’s offices publish the photos of newly registered offenders in their jurisdictions in their local newspapers, and the GBI maintains a registry of all offenders.

However, 22 states, including Georgia, have gone further by imposing residency or work limits on offenders on the registry. Of those, Georgia’s law is among the most extreme.

According to a recent count, 14,572 people are now listed on the Georgia registry. While a large number are rapists and child molesters, only 38 are classified by the state as predators, someone “who suffers from a mental abnormality or personality disorder or attitude that places the person at risk of perpetrating any future predatory sexually violent offenses.”

Obviously, the public has every reason and right to know the whereabouts of those offenders, 12 of whom are behind bars. Just as obviously, the sex offender registry should include those convicted of rape and child molestation, and place restrictions on their activities.

However, the registry doesn’t need to include the lowest level offenders, least of all teenagers punished for sex acts that, unfortunately, are now common among high school students. Half of teens ages 15 to 19 have had oral sex, according to a 2005 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report. That does not mean that half of teens belong on a sex-offender registry.

Unfortunately, changing state law to remove people such as Whitaker and Wilson is difficult. Instead, the instinct of politicians is always to toughen such restrictions, often without thinking through questions of effectiveness or fairness.

For those who haven’t heard this here before, please read William Saletan in Slate on rethinking the age of consent. He offers the most nuanced, thoughtful and appropriate direction for an answer I’ve seen. He distinguishes between physical, cognitive and emotional maturity and tosses out a starting point that needs to be discussed and debated:

I’d draw the object line at 12, the cognitive line at 16, and the self-regulatory line at 25. I’d lock up anyone who went after a 5-year-old. I’d come down hard on a 38-year-old who married a 15-year-old. And if I ran a college, I’d discipline professors for sleeping with freshmen. When you’re 35, “she’s legal” isn’t good enough.

What I wouldn’t do is slap a mandatory sentence on a 17-year-old, even if his nominal girlfriend were 12. I know the idea of sex at that age is hard to stomach. I wish our sexual, cognitive, and emotional maturation converged in a magic moment we could call the age of consent. But they don’t.

The entire piece cries out to be read and understood.