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Dammit.../. ate my link. Let's try again...Enigma photo here.

It's funny how people are very quick to lecture on how the US doesn't necessarily work the way the US Constitution says it should but assume the People's Republic of China works the way the Constitution says it does.

Actually if you read the wiki article

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_people's_court_of_the_People's_Republic_of_China

During the 1940s and 1950s, People's Courts were village meetings in which peasants would complain about their landlords. This was known as 'Speak Bitterness' and was set up by the Communists for the denunciation of landlords.

Hmm, more Googling finds this

http://hilly2007-8.wikispaces.com/Speak+Bitterness+Meetings

The "Speak Bitterness" Meetings, as they were called, came after The Agrarian Reform Law (June 30, 1950). This law being introduced not too long after Chairman Mao Zedong gained control in 1949, gained control of all of China's land for the new government, and allowed them to use and distribute the land as needed. With this new distribution of land, the wealthy or 'rich' population in China (specifically farm owning/ landlords,) had parts of their land taken from them and given to "poor" peasants. This certainly caused the peasants to benefit from this law, and those who already already owned the land to grief from it, however this concern for land-owners was soon distracted by the "Speak Bitterness" trials. Because the vast majority of China was lower class, they more than likely had been under the employment or have suffered from a Land-owning person, and so the Communist party members encouraged the peasants to go to these meetings and 'speak bitterness' about their grief and those who may have caused that grief.

In addition, the vast majority of peasants in China had little to no education, they had no reason to think that this would cause draw backs or repercussions to the economy and themselves. These meetings along with the newly given land distracted peasants from the fact that they had no equipment, wealth or money to cultivate the land given to them, and focused their anger and contempt towards their previous land owners, or even those who they simply did not like. China became something similar to the Salem Witch trials or old Soviet Russia in the peasant areas under Stalin, in which people were turning on each other simply because they could. Communist party members actually encouraged it, so the peasants pointed the finger of blame on who ever they wanted with the intention that they would benefit from it, and simply hope that they were not pointed at or seen as having unjustly pointed their finger. Any one could be a target, even some one who was previously in the CCP. That having been said, some peasants began to accuse people who used to or were in the CCP, this could be because they did not like the person or just because they were associated with the CCP, as well as the fact that they could not do so before.
The CCP managed to distract the population by turning the lower class against the upper class and caused the upper class to be too worried about their fate to blame the CCP. This benefits the CCP themselves for having control over the population, and in turn benefit anyone else who could gain from CCP control.

So the People's Court was not really about the presumption of innocence.

More to the point the Constitution in China grants rights like freedom of speech, freedom of association and son which Chinese people demonstrably don't enjoy - consider Tiananmen. In fact lawyers in China have been arrested merely for trying to enforce these rights

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Constitution_Initiative

There is a group who found a way to easily restore that ageing yellow plastic. I think the use hydrogen peroxide. I'm too lazy to Google it right now, but if you are interested in a full resotration this is possible.

http://retr0bright.wikispaces.com/

Never seen the point in old PCs myself since they're just wimpy Intel systems... but I do a lot with old Amiga, Commodore, Atari and other machines. Disks - you can find cheap newly made floppies in older formats (5.15" or 3.5" in double or single density). Search around or ask on http://www.vintage-computer.com/ forums or some of the good Amiga oriented web forums, you'll get a ton of sources depending on where you live. Many sources in the US and Europe. Avoid buying old/reused floppies if possible, and copy as much of your old disks to new disks as you can. You can probably find an old IDE controller for it easily too. Remember old hard drives are less reliable so do backups often. OS - you can find old MSDOS disks on ebay I'm sure. You may also want to consider the free clone FreeDOS. Yellowing - there's some peroxide based cream someone came up with to restore color to yellowed plastic. See http://retr0bright.wikispaces.com/

The "Retr0brite" method discovered last year could restore the case to its original color. It counters the bromides and other additives that actually cause the yellowing. It uses hydrogen peroxide with Oxiclean-type stuff, an extra booster if desired, and UV rays as a catalyst.

http://retr0bright.wikispaces.com/

...healthy 25-year-old yellowed plastic...

This might help with that part of the restoration (cheap and DIY)...

It's not bleaching - they use it to undo the yellowing chemical reaction on a gray Atari 130XE. It goes from yellow-brown right back to gray.

It's absolutely amazing.

A good engineering challange is building a something launcher. Whether it be eggs, taters, t shirts, etc., the project will provide many reasons to do the engineering. Recently I participated in an engineering challange for high school students to build a t shirt launcher.

Some of the items needed solved were what type of stored energy to use, how to release it quickly and effeciently, and how to transfer the energy with little loss of energy.

Some of the material was beyond HS physics, so some stuff came to measurement, trial and error, and tweaking for best performance.

Here is the web page dedicated to finding out the best diameter and length of a launch tube to match the stored enengy supply in both volume, pressure, and flow rate from the valve.

https://inteltrailblazerschallenge.wikispaces.com/Barrel+length+trim+method

We measured the acceleration of stuff in the launch tube to find the point where the acceleration dropped off at the peak speed and cut it there.

We won the competition. Arlington HS is the overall winner.

Those guys have me hooked now on competition marshmallow launching. I just built a small version (0.8L tank) of the launcher. From the sound, I think it's supersonic. I'll be getting near a shooting chrono later to find out if I made supersonic.

The t shirt cannon was launching apples in excess of 800 FPS. I'm hoping I'm getting marshmallows in excess of 1100 FPS.

Impact of fruit against 1 L water bottles can be seen here.
https://inteltrailblazerschallenge.wikispaces.com/Photos

Tons of fun. Think safety if you embark on this trial.

A good engineering challange is building a something launcher. Whether it be eggs, taters, t shirts, etc., the project will provide many reasons to do the engineering. Recently I participated in an engineering challange for high school students to build a t shirt launcher.

Some of the items needed solved were what type of stored energy to use, how to release it quickly and effeciently, and how to transfer the energy with little loss of energy.

Some of the material was beyond HS physics, so some stuff came to measurement, trial and error, and tweaking for best performance.

Here is the web page dedicated to finding out the best diameter and length of a launch tube to match the stored enengy supply in both volume, pressure, and flow rate from the valve.

https://inteltrailblazerschallenge.wikispaces.com/Barrel+length+trim+method

We measured the acceleration of stuff in the launch tube to find the point where the acceleration dropped off at the peak speed and cut it there.

We won the competition. Arlington HS is the overall winner.

Those guys have me hooked now on competition marshmallow launching. I just built a small version (0.8L tank) of the launcher. From the sound, I think it's supersonic. I'll be getting near a shooting chrono later to find out if I made supersonic.

The t shirt cannon was launching apples in excess of 800 FPS. I'm hoping I'm getting marshmallows in excess of 1100 FPS.

Impact of fruit against 1 L water bottles can be seen here.
https://inteltrailblazerschallenge.wikispaces.com/Photos

Tons of fun. Think safety if you embark on this trial.

Which distro? Because I use Ubuntu for my desktop and I'm a geek, and I still get frustrated (fuck pulseaudio).

If you are primarily using the PC for AV stuff, the real time kernel and bundled apps in Ubuntu Studio are hard to beat. I use it for my studio recording and production. Jack and related apps can be a pain to set up and use, but provide huge flexibility when working. For simpler stuff, Audacity is hard to beat. At the moment, stick with USB interfaces. There are still a few bugs with some of the firewire capture stuff. Read the Forums to see what works.

Audacity is very flexible. We even used it for an engineering project to design a t shirt launcher for a competition. We needed a way to figure out how long to make the launch tube. Audacity provided a way to measure the acceleration of the t shirt in the launch tube to figure out at what point it stopped accelerating and thus the length to cut for maximum launch velocity.

Scroll down to the Audacity screenshot to see how we did it.
https://inteltrailblazerschallenge.wikispaces.com/Barrel+length+trim+method

We won the overall competition.
https://inteltrailblazerschallenge.wikispaces.com/Blazer+Game

Which distro? Because I use Ubuntu for my desktop and I'm a geek, and I still get frustrated (fuck pulseaudio).

If you are primarily using the PC for AV stuff, the real time kernel and bundled apps in Ubuntu Studio are hard to beat. I use it for my studio recording and production. Jack and related apps can be a pain to set up and use, but provide huge flexibility when working. For simpler stuff, Audacity is hard to beat. At the moment, stick with USB interfaces. There are still a few bugs with some of the firewire capture stuff. Read the Forums to see what works.

Audacity is very flexible. We even used it for an engineering project to design a t shirt launcher for a competition. We needed a way to figure out how long to make the launch tube. Audacity provided a way to measure the acceleration of the t shirt in the launch tube to figure out at what point it stopped accelerating and thus the length to cut for maximum launch velocity.

Scroll down to the Audacity screenshot to see how we did it.
https://inteltrailblazerschallenge.wikispaces.com/Barrel+length+trim+method

We won the overall competition.
https://inteltrailblazerschallenge.wikispaces.com/Blazer+Game

http://johnmayer.wikispaces.com/ http://hyundai-cars.wikispaces.com/

http://johnmayer.wikispaces.com/ http://hyundai-cars.wikispaces.com/

I find what works best is to supply examples of fine open source software that runs on Windows and Linux. Once they grasp the concept of free open source software and the missing hurdles to it's use, the next step is to note the OS itself is free software. As an example, this page I wrote concerning an engineering challenge for launching t shirts at a NBA game. The engineering task was to find the optimum length for the launch tube. Note the use of open source software in the solution. When the teacher compared the open source solution to the Microsoft Sound Recorder or other packaged solution, then the seed for the concept is planted. Have the teacher read the license. um End User License Agreement. On a side note, the final and winner announcement will be this Friday. Our team has an excellent chance of winning. The teacher knows that I use The Gimp to size photos for the wiki, etc on a Linux machine. Windows is not needed.

https://inteltrailblazerschallenge.wikispaces.com/Barrel+length+trim+method

When Open Source is the best solution, it gets noticed. It is no longer just hobbiest software.

Sorta funny, since Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen owns the Trailblazers.

I find what works best is to supply examples of fine open source software that runs on Windows and Linux. Once they grasp the concept of free open source software and the missing hurdles to it's use, the next step is to note the OS itself is free software. As an example, this page I wrote concerning an engineering challenge for launching t shirts at a NBA game. The engineering task was to find the optimum length for the launch tube. Note the use of open source software in the solution. When the teacher compared the open source solution to the Microsoft Sound Recorder or other packaged solution, then the seed for the concept is planted. Have the teacher read the license. um End User License Agreement. On a side note, the final and winner announcement will be this Friday. Our team has an excellent chance of winning. The teacher knows that I use The Gimp to size photos for the wiki, etc on a Linux machine. Windows is not needed.

https://inteltrailblazerschallenge.wikispaces.com/Barrel+length+trim+method

When Open Source is the best solution, it gets noticed. It is no longer just hobbiest software.

There are so many "kids don't need computers" replies, but I have lots of experience to the contrary, mostly with kids with disabilities. One of the things we've discovered is that the concept of "precursor skills" is total crap. You learn to do things by doing them, no need to wait for kids to be "ready" to do it. (This is the core of tenet of the Constructivist theory of learning that OLPC subscribes to). Kids don't need to read and spell to use a computer successfully.

No one is suggesting substituting computer use for other types of play, but kids want to do things that they see adults at large doing. Computer use is now, and for the foreseeable future, a standard part of our culture now. It will be one toy/tool among many in his/her environment.

I'm a strong believer in Paint as a first program. Best mouse training ever.

Followed by word processing. Try to read whatever they write and pretend like they are writing something completely relevant and meaningful every time. You'll see it evolve into real writing over time.

The term they've started using at the Center for Literacy and Disability Studies at UNC Chapel Hill is "Alternative Pencil."

http://www.aac-rerc.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=135&Itemid=152
http://alltogether.wordpress.com/2007/11/13/tar-heel-typer-an-open-source-alternative-pencil/
https://otot.wikispaces.com/Alternative+Pencil+Directions

Doesn't Songbird work with the Nano? It doesn't solve the main poster's problem, but it solves yours, doesn't it?

Dunno, I don't use Songbird. I have found that the latest libgpod does support 3rd Gen nanos so I can get it working, no thanks to Apple. http://gtkpod.wikispaces.com/Supported+iPods

There is nothing Green or Sustainable about Industrial Society, or even civilisation itself, as all such efforts entail the inevitable draw down and destruction of irreplaceable natural resources.

So before you all go rushing off to buy your fuel cell cars to shlep you to your job enabling the mindless consumption of resources and goods, kindly apprise yourself of how utterly devastating your every choice is upon the planet.

A major failure of capitalist economics is its discounting of the future - it works to maximise immediate profits, but when applied to resource management, it necessarily entails ecocide.

So, sure: get in with the hydrogen economy, and push the species over the cliff. We're already well into overshoot, and fuel cells are just the first of what will prove to be many failed attempts at sustianing the unsustainable.

Another solution is the open source speed limit database: http://www.osldb.com/ Its preventive, not cop-chasing. Anycan can contribute or build gizmos which control your speed as I did. See here: http://gpscruise.wikispaces.com/ Its a smart cruise control using the osldb speed limit database. But it doesnt matter, because alas, only the first 10 reply posters on slashdot ever get read I am afraid. This is too far down in the mud....

Nice sales pitch, but you have to jailbreak the Ipod touch for it to work with libgpod. http://gtkpod.wikispaces.com/FAQ#JailBroken

HERE:http://cheapass.wikispaces.com/ is an e-mail server I wrote, take a copy! It's licensed also. Most of my work, I give away freely. Check out my SIGNIFICANT contributions to http://www.slackwiki.org/!

EVDO can't support the subscriber density that Ricochet can/could. Get a dozen active users per square mile and EVDO gets pretty sluggish. Ditto with EDGE/HSDPA.

Wireless data is driven by the principle of geographic frequency reuse. If you can make short-distance transmissions, you can use less power, which means there can be someone else using the same channel just a short distance away. If you're far from your tower and need a lot of power, you tie up the channel for a wider area, meaning that fewer subscribers can be satisfied per unit of spectrum.

With a microcellular network like Ricochet, there are several poletops per square mile, and the same channel might be in use several times within a square mile. With cellular towers, a single sector usually serves several square miles, so a lower user density saturates the spectrum. Ricochet never achieved user density to come anywhere close to capacity, whereas many urban EVDO sites run maxed out for hours a day.

Metricom's Ricochet was ahead of its time, and not marketed effectively. They built a very dense, capable network, anticipating the internet growth that didn't materialize until many years later. They didn't have the financial resources of a giant cellular company to weather the lull, and their recurring costs killed them. Their assets were sold at auction, and have since changed hands several times. YDI/Proxim currently maintains Ricochet networks in the cities where they inherited contractual obligations, but the rest of the markets sit abandoned.

Ricochet's still relevant in areas where cable and DSL aren't available, because while not speedy by today's standards, it wipes the floor with dialup and is more than adequate for most uses. The deployment cost is dirt-cheap, and the modems can be had for a song. That's part of the problem though, because you can't sell a customer a $100 modem if they can get it for $5 on eBay.

The modems are also useful for peer-to-peer networking over distances that wifi can't touch. They do a mile in open space, and half a mile pretty reliably in an urban environment. The 900MHz band is wide open, and penetrates buildings much better than 2.4GHz. If you get 'em above the terrain, they'll do five or ten miles on the stock antennae. There's some user-driven research on the Ricochet Wiki if you're interested.

I envision it more like a hamster in a cage...

You know, I love the format and ruggedness of my CF-M34, but the performance kind of sucks. Since all I really want is the case, perhaps this is a solution - albeit one requiring a bit of hardware hacking.

Once I get my media server back I'll be installing the web based control software and then figuring out how to get the old XP MCE based software to install on Vista.

I'm doing it myself because I'm a geek (saying that while posting on /. is redundant, right?) and actually I'd like to start doing it professionally.

So you're going to buy essentially premade stuff and install it using the constraints given to you by the makers of the software. Can't think of a more un-geeklike way of going about it. Using Vista isn't a point to your credit, either.

A geekier thing would be to use Mister House at the very least...making the control system an old PC would make this even better.

You also lose a few geek points for using hardware you didn't design yourself, and for using newer, more expensive equipment (geeks design on a budget, which in this case would be buying the much cheaper X10 hardware).

All in all, I'd say you're operating a lot closer to a geek-squad member than an actual geek. But they stay in business.

If it's new enough, even low-skill work can be high paying.

Like those above have said, check out the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) or a derivative like k12ltsp or Skolelinux. You can then keep using those old machines till they drop and then phase them out as they die. Many distros, like Ubuntu for example, already have LTSP client support.

EdTechLive has some excellent interviews on LTSP with staff that have rolled it out at their schools or, in some cases, districts. The sound quality in some of them is not so good, but the material is worth straining your ears for.

You're exactly right, Wi-fi is a last-meter solution, and people are trying to use it for last-mile and more. It'd be wonderful to see a solar-powered wireless mesh network, but not running 802.11anything!

What's interesting is that the Ricochet network has already been designed, deployed, proven, mismarketed, and abandoned. Metricom's routing protocol was vastly superior to anything else in this space, and now YDI's got the patents locked up.

Airespace was founded by a bunch of ex-Metricom brains, and it looks like they built many of the same smarts into the same casing. Then Airespace got bought by Cisco and they call it the 1500. I wouldn't mind playing with a few dozen of these.

Anyway, if someone could convince YDI to open the intellectual property, that warehouse full of Ricochet poletops could be deployed anywhere in the world. The modems are cheap, the hardware is bulletproof, and did I mention they go a mile on the stock rubber ducks?

You're exactly right, Wi-fi is a last-meter solution, and people are trying to use it for last-mile and more. It'd be wonderful to see a solar-powered wireless mesh network, but not running 802.11anything!

What's interesting is that the Ricochet network has already been designed, deployed, proven, mismarketed, and abandoned. Metricom's routing protocol was vastly superior to anything else in this space, and now YDI's got the patents locked up.

Airespace was founded by a bunch of ex-Metricom brains, and it looks like they built many of the same smarts into the same casing. Then Airespace got bought by Cisco and they call it the 1500. I wouldn't mind playing with a few dozen of these.

Anyway, if someone could convince YDI to open the intellectual property, that warehouse full of Ricochet poletops could be deployed anywhere in the world. The modems are cheap, the hardware is bulletproof, and did I mention they go a mile on the stock rubber ducks?

"If that were true, all the mosquitoes would have moved to Wisconsin."

They did. Only the small and weak mosquitos didn't have the energy to migrate, so they stayed in Minnesota. We get the ones that look like this.http://correl.wikispaces.com/space/showimage/ stirge.gif

You shouldn't have to wait for the drives to come out. Laptop drive controllers can address a master and a slave, they just don't have a slave drive connected in normal usage. I was just looking for an adapter to let me put a pair of CF cards in place of a 2.5" hard drive. (I can only find the single-card version in a 2.5" form factor, all the dual-card ones are for 3.5" mounting.) I figure, put a solid-state card in one slot and a microdrive in the other, and I've got a hybrid-drive laptop, right?

I just got rid of an old toughbook cf-25 that would've been perfect for this, as the drive mounting is gel and would easily accomodate an oddly shaped adapter instead of a regular drive. Or for the truly insane, a CF card piggybacked on a regular 2.5" drive! All I need is the ability to home-brew those little flex cables, and I'd be in business.

Mod parent poster up! And not just for disability reasons.

Last time I was in an art lab, one student was chipping away at a stone statue, and stone chips were flying everywhere. A few bits of sand got into the keyboard and were making it hard to type. A blast from the air compressor didn't dislodge them, so I sluiced the keyboard under the faucet a few times, and whacked the corner of the machine on the sink to get the water out. It worked great, but just try that with your Dell. I dare you. (Gratuitous linkage: Fans of Toughbooks can find more info on the fledgling Toughbook Wiki.)

I like being able to use my laptop in the rain, or not worry if it falls into a snowdrift while I'm walking back to a site. Perhaps some of your students value the same traits. Perhaps some of them already own capable machines which don't happen to be Dell or Apple. Locking the students into a specific brand or brands is not cool.

That's nothing. Fans are still reverse-engineering Wasteland:

http://wasteland.wikispaces.com/

We use one over at the Toughbook wiki to keep track of details of various machines.

I've been looking for a good table manipulation tool. Wiki tables like the HardwareComparison quickly grow out of control. A way to sort and filter records, show and hide columns, an define alternate views for tabular data, would be great.

I picture sort of a webmail-like interface. Perhaps the data shouldn't live in the wiki page at all, but in a real database back-end with the appropriate interface(s) for adding and editing records.

In some projects I work on, the bosses email a "tracker" spreadsheet back and forth, where each site has a row, and each stage or activity has a column. They sort and filter the spreadsheets to get a picture of progress. One challenge is getting the data in, since it comes from dozens of different field techs, shippers, other companies, and arbitrary other events. Another challenge is making sure everyone has the most updated version, since emailing a file around is effectively file-level locking, so no more than one person can be working at once.

A central store like a database, with web interfaces that any Excel weenie could use, would alleviate much of the trouble. A hybrid of spreadsheet functions, database query tools, and wiki-like markup, could be really powerful. Anyone know if such a thing might exist, or if such projects might be in the works?

Saying that "gas is better for cooking" is only true if you're talking about traditional electric cooktops. Induction is superior to gas. See http://inductioncooking.wikispaces.com/AboutInduct ion (disclaimer: I maintain that website, although the information is collected from various sources).

That said, I don't see a lot of use for a pre-programmed cooking routine. It will only work when you can guarantee the consistency of your ingredients (making caramel or deep frying come to mind, but there are already cooktops that can maintain a set temperature +/-5C).

what do we do to fix it? The revolution isn't necessarily televised or computerized. I know that quotation has been used by tyrants.. but it holds some truth.

See http://health.wikispaces.com./ It is more accurate than WebDB.. or at least that's the aim. It is invitation-only right now, but if you know someone or know people or if you yourself want to become involved in a project that relies on old-fashioned research and citation, that would be really cool.

--Sam

PageRank is worth a lot more than vanity.

For businesses, it gets you seen. Few people are going to try to look at anything beyond the first page or two of search results. Therefore, if you are #35 on the listings for a keyword vital to you, you're going to get a lot less traffic. If you are a business, and you have 5 competitors selling X, then whenever someone Googles X, your goal is to be the first website they see (aside from X.com or whatever the parent company is).

For non business organizations, if you want people to read what you have to say, like if you're a blog or a wiki or just a regular site, it helps to be one of the first sites on the google listing. For instance, two days ago I started a wiki as a project to create a third American political Party based on a technologist and freedom stance, as opposed to big business. Now, it's not for money and is just for a fun project, but I want people to see it and contribute. Obviously I have an interest in SEO, but I'm too cheap to pay for it.

The Riya launch party is this Friday, November 18th in Atherton, CA. Details at http://ojos.wikispaces.com/Riya+Launch+Details