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Slashback: Ghana, Graphics, Tumors
The few, the proud, the advententurous, the dorky. Elvis Maximus writes: "Geekcorps has been mentioned here before and met with some interest. Their first batch of volunteers are winding up their tours in Ghana, and the Industry Standard has run a nice piece on their experiences. This is an interesting effort that deserves some attention."
Congratulations (and admiration) to those who participated in this. GeekCorps is good stuff.
Remember, saliva causes stomach cancer ... ByteHog points to this AP story about the alleged connection between cell phone use and cancer, writing: "Kinda interesting, but I'm still going to be wearing tinfoil around my head whenever I make a call ..."
This issue has been raised for years, with no clear winner. The upshot from this study is a data point for the null hypothesis, but inevitably this will drag on, and the next study to become famous will probably be one that contradicts this. Don your tin-foil, kneepads and breathing masks, until fatality is cured.
Resistance is futile, for now. Fervent writes: "Gamecenter has an interesting article on why 3DFX collapsed. Among the reason cited: the proprietary API Glide, not allowing OEM's to sell Voodoo hardware, and NVidia's agressive product cycle." This makes an intersting followup to the recent announcement of the absorption of 3dfx by NVidia.
Play, play, play, and be gone with ye! Greyfox writes: "According to USA Today Etoys is putting itself up for sale. It's the standard dot com failure story. It'd be delicious irony if the folks running the Etoy domain they sued a while back bought their domain name." DarkKnight points to this link at CNETas well.
Yes, I think that the purchase of STB was the downfall of 3dfx. STB always made dislikable cards, anyway; their stupid 'STB Vision' crap fouled up more than one system that I've seen. I can just see some poor suit somewhere holding his head in his hands and going 'Why, oh, why did I buy STB?'
I'm not sure I'd blame it on the lateness of the V3. I think that reputation could have held them through that one, if they hadn't gone with STB... 'course, maybe without STB they'd have been on time?
It's interesting that the V3 did show up on-board in Dell systems for a while. Makes me wonder why they did that, and yet not the old style 'buy our chips' deals.
Ah, well... I suppose we could speculate like that for a long long time...
EOT
I have no real information on this, and at the risk of sounding like a troll, the obvious answer is YES, especially if you look at how many games support glide these days!
Vassily's quote is fine and dandy. Disclaimer have to be done in a way that they can be read, and so that a "resonable man" can understand their purpose. "Literally frying your brain" is a phrase that sounds great as a warning that something BAD could happen--and it's more easily read, and thus more likely to be read, than boring all-caps EULA legalese.
"Rodent studies are essentially useless"
Pull your head out of your ass. Rodents are used because they are very close to humans in several aspects: digestion, excretion, immune response, physiology, anatomy etc. Rodents are used because they're CHEAP. And, you can do studies with sucessive generations. So, you see, it's a damn good thing they don't live as long as humans. If they did, they wouldn't be used for experimentation. Where do you think half the drugs developed came from? They don't test new things on people right away - they use mice/rats.
"Besides, what causes cancer in rats doesn't necessarily cause cancer in humans".
I bet'cha all 226 of those were carcinogenic to humans - ranging from mild to severe. Remember, we're all mammals. Physiology is physiology. Ever notice how they group animals together? Birds, reptiles, amphibians, mammals... All mammals have a liver, a brain, etc.
The fact that you can irradiate a rat is a good thing. You can simulate YEARS of exposure over a course of a couple weeks.
The study should not be criticized for its use of rats or mice. You need to look at the scientific process. Examine their methodology. Perhaps someone messed up the statistics? Was it a controlled environment? Are there confounding variables? Example: to do this properly, they would need to expose the rats/mice over the course of their lifetime with comparable doses of radiation that a human would recieve.
(To spell it out: You can find brutality and superstition anywhere. Especially in countries that still have the death penalty. Right beside that, you can find freedom, justice, and science. Life is complex; deal with it.)
Joshua
Terradot
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout!
I used to have only my trusty cell phone until recently when I moved into a new apartment and was required to have a landline hooked up for the stupid door intercom (which, wouldn't you know, is operated by Uncle Bell), otherwise I would have stuck with just the cell. With their newfound mass popularity, cell phones are cheaper than ever and so it the airtime. Buying the hardware is cheaper than the installation fees for a landline, and you can get a very nice cell for less than the cost of a basic LCD display desk phone. The only thing that's tricky with a cell is dial-up net access, but the advent of broadband greatly alleviates this little hitch. I still harass the building management every month when I pay the rent, begging them to get rid of the old crappy intercom and get a better cheaper cell-friendly system. It costs me about 30$ (canadian) for a landline that serves nearly no purpose except to unlock the front door for the pizza guy and to crank up my stats on mp3.com *wink*. Once again, Bell sucks!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
In my mind it's more about giving the average Ghanian a window to the world outside Ghana, about giving them a voice in the global communications network of this planet. This is an important thing, I think. I'd never heard of Geekcorps before, but I find myself rather excited and intrigued by the idea.
Terradot
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout!
A perspective on the latter days of 3dfx from the perspective of a disgruntled shareholder: http://boards.fool.com/Message.asp?mid=13929930&so rt=threaded
There are not many free electrons floating around in your brain.
No? There are certainly ions involved in signal propagation down axons. Where do all the electrons go?
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
> It's worth pointing out that, while sometimes the company outlives its cash, the stockholders almost never do.
Whelp, Stockmaster has the chart for MSFT. Could you run up the anticipated date for us?
It's not quite so nearly monotonic as the dot coms you list, but it's still not the kind of thing that cheers stockholders.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This person hit the nail on the head. In keeping with a 600+ year tradition, the white is about to fuck the black once again.
If any white person (or country) wanted to truly help an African, and by 'help' I mean with no strings attached, said white would feed said African or teach said African how to grow food. Instead, whitey always plants the seed of his own profit on African soil. Any 'gift' to Africa always has some string attached, such as an explicit (or implicit) agreement that will favor whitey sooner or later. For examples, foreign aid never comes without 'encouragement' to have a western-style government, or to house our troops, or to get addicted to our tobacco or our coca-cola (leading cause of diabetes worldwide). So, five years from now we'll be farming out our web design to a Ghanan for $1/hr, but he won't be able to afford our overpriced cancer drugs. It's like slavery, but enough money changes hands to make it appear not to be.
I'd rather be a unix freak than a freaky eunuch
Ewige Blumenkraft!
The study of 891 people did find a slightly increased risk for a rare type of brain cancer, but the researchers said it was not statistically significant.
:-). Science journalists should be required to take stats courses in journalism school.
Why the hell does the media report "effects" that aren't statistically significant? A study also has a 50% chance of finding a non-significant correlation between cell phone use and below-average penis size (assuming penis size and cell phone use are unrelated--if they are related, YMMV). This is just alarmism (kinda like my use of bolding above
"Since most solid tumors take 10 to 15 years to develop, it is probably too soon to see an effect"
If you did a study of the effect of smoking on people who have only been smoking for three years, it would be almost impossible for scientists to prove that smoking is harmful [snip] The same could apply to cell phones.
I am not an oncologist, but what you are saying sounds quite reasonable. Given that it takes 10 - 15 years for cancer to develop, any studies that do find a correlation between cell phone usage must be crap, since cell phones haven't been around that long. Now, since there's no evidence that cell phones are carcinogenic (how could there be if cancer takes longer to develop than cell phones have been around), why are we worrying?
Cell phones emit non-ionizing radiation at lower power levels. Compare this to the natural radioactivity and cosmic radiation which you're constantly exposed to (which is certainly ionizing). Now, without any reliable evidence to suggest a significant risk, why should we be concerned about cell phones? I think this whole scare has stemmed out of BYRS (Bourgeois Yuppie Resentment Syndrome), and not science.
Maybe. Until there's any reason to think that cell phones really do cause cancer, why give people ideas?
Regardless, such a wavier could note that the chances of future research revealing a non-zero cancer risk can be bounded by present research to be pretty dern low.
For details, see the FAQ file Cellular Phone Antennas (Base Stations) and Human Health maintained by Doc Moulder, prof of Radiation Oncology at the Medical College of Wisconsin.
(There are a number of other useful EMF FAQs available at the same site.)
--
"You've crossed my Line of Death!" "What? No! Where is it?" "Here in the fine print...."
Ghana is a country with an average wage of only $160 per year. Out of a total population of 20 million, some 20 thousand are online. Why are we creating charities to get such nations online? Isn't that like forming a charity to send them Beluga Caviar? We should surely be concentrating on building their infrastructure in the proper way, and try to bring them through the industrial revolution first.
Your post reminds me of the posts in response to stories about 100" monitors that ask "what Quake player has the money?" when the product isn't even intended for retail.
This project isn't about turning the average Ghanaian into a happy websurfer. It's about giving the average Ghanaian a chance at a decent job, or his business a chance at success.
Don't discount third-world countries just because they haven't developed, say, an automobile industry: the time for that is past. That strategy was tried by the World Bank in 2nd tier countries like Brazil and India in the 1960s with disastrous results. Unregulated manufacturers polluted, the products were inferior to other markets, and the only people who made money were the bankers.
India has gotten smart. They never caught up industrially with the West. Jumping from agrarian to industrial proved expensive and futile. Instead, they've concentrated on the Second Industrial Revolution, building technical schools that turn out skilled programmers by the metric ton. These knowledge workers find work in outsourcing firms, or travel to the West for high-paying jobs. The resource that India is wisely exploiting here is its people.
It worries me to see that companies such as Shell and BT are contributing funds to send IT technicians there, when what we should be doing is sending agricultural experts and trying to attract magnates of industry
Another poorly considered policy of the latter half of Century Twenty was building Third World countries into agricultural exporters. Many of those countries could not feed their own people, and did not have the infrastructure or resources to support an exporting food industry. Once again, the bankers made money. The people often ended up poorer and hungrier. The grain available from traditional heartlands like the US and Russia was of higher quality and easily shipped. (Actually this fiasco largely predated the industrialization fiasco.)
Don't underestimate the ingenuity and inventiveness found in "third world" countries. Some of them are building out their telecommunications by skipping the 19th (copper) and 20th (fiber) century and jumping straight to the 21st (wireless). They don't have any installed base to protect. Innovations like "texting" (SMS messaging) and wacky computer virii have sprung from the Phillippines.
Dooming third world countries to another century of building up their economies "the hard way" is typical exclusivist Western thinking.
As the west moves towards an increasingly service based economy, there are opportunities for countries such as Ghana to grab onto our coattails and provide our manufacturing capabilty, before moving up to join us.
Perhaps. But they'd have to compete with already-cheap industrial powers like Mexico and China. Meanwhile, they have few resources, no industrial infrastructure, and it's enormously expensive to build.
Why, again, do they HAVE to have an industrial 20th century economy before they can move into the 21st? What does that gain them? What does it gain us? So in whose interest is it for them to build an old-style manufacturing base? Yep.
You'd make a great IMF banker a generation ago.
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
The last time I moved, it took the phone company over a week to tell me why they failed to install my phone line. Apparently they had to dig a trench. Somewhere. Not sure where but it would definately take at least a month (this was from the person in charge of scheduling the area's work crews). I told 'em to get bent, traded in my old analog phone for digital, and haven't missed PacBell for a second. That was 1.5 years ago.
I'm not the only one doing this. My grandfather uses his cell phone exclusively when calling me because what's local on his cell phone is long distance on the land line. My dad's considering making the change as well. Several friends have decided it'll be part of their next move just for the simplicity if nothing else. When I got my phone, I was in and out in half an hour. When's the last time you had a "traditional" phone up and running that fast? :)
About the only reasons to keep a phone line these days are for internet access (assuming you can't/won't get a cablemodem) and fax machines.
Why must a country go through the mess of an industrial revolution to recieve the benefits of other, newer technologies?
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
Simultaneously, you could measure how long it takes the rats to figure out ebay and see if there is an increased amount of cancer cells in the brains of the rats when they keel over.
More seriously, you could attempt to model the RF output of the phones on a human's head to that of a rat and see useful data in a little less time.
/ \
\ / ASCII ribbon campaign for peace
x
/ \
Our Univ. class has an unwritten rule. If your cell phone interrupts the prof, at the end of the class you have to stand on your desk and do the chicken dance. So far, it has only been enacted(sp?) three or four times. They are going to try to apply this rule to the entire department.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
I actually interviewed there once (didnt get the job which seems a good thing now). Their waiting room was like a toy store. Big giant chairs, train sets and toys lying around.
The people that started etoys were the same people that used to run linux.com years ago.
Note that I'm not saying that evidence for cell-phone cancer is there, or not there, only that you cannot logically dismiss the possibility out-of-hand on the basis you're claiming.
Hmm, makes me glad to sleep on a simple futon.Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Complete line:
Radiation! Yes indeed! You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-bock, do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you... pernicious nonsense!
Everyone go buy it on DVD and listen to the commentary.
It would be even better to see etoys sell it's self on ebay.
Actually, the above should me re-moderated as "Funny" instead. Even though they have a 17% growth, it is not nearly enough to get investors interested, and on their own power... well, since they are just burning cash away, and don't have anyware to get it from except for the tiny stream of revenue... they are doomed to run out of cash in March. In other words, they are officially screwed. And, if you understand that, you ought to understand that the reply sounds really funny rather than "Interesting". :)
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burn, e-toys, burn...
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Jobs? Which jobs?
In Russia we have a saying "The spoon is valuable, but only if it's available by the dinner time" Horrible translation, but that's the way it is with idioms. The idea is that, if you server a spoon when the dinner is pretty much over, you're late. :(
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Isn't that the case here? I though glide was proprietary, or at least way too long, and that's why it was not (or could not be) embraced by everybody in the industry.
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Jobs? Which jobs?
Is that the study was conducted between 1996 and 1998 (IIRC - I saw discussion about this on the news today) and the average person in the study used their cell phone 2.5 hours per MONTH.
I'd say that more research needs to be done about this, as cell phones are much much more common today than they were even 2 years ago. Not only that, but it is not uncommon for some people to use cell phones over 2 hours every day.
so...cell phone users are gonna get cancer eh.
this is fabulous news for smokers - we got over that whole "oh shit, i could get cancer" thing a looooong time ago.
of course, this probably means that "cellers" are going to have to go to designated "celling" sections...and they'll have to associate with other "cellers" as non-cellers think it's a disgusting habit (you can SMELL all the gadgets they have. and their houses are littered with computers and other electronics!! peew!)
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
One sad thing about the apparent demise of eToys is that they were probably the largest e-commerce site running on mostly open source software. It's been reported before that they use Linux, Apache, and Perl to run their site.
It's my understanding that STB is one of the few hardware vendors who participated in the X Consortium who had anything to do with 'commodity' PC Components.
I have always liked using STB cards with XFree86. They're just good hardware.
Hay thar.
I'm sending this from my Palm Pilot, which is connected (14.4k) to a Motorola StarTAC phone. This phone is rated best in radiation tests, because a large part of the phone is in between you and that lethal antenae. It is made even safer by the fact that it is setting 3 feet away from me. The Palm makes for a barely usable, if slow, internet experience.
Note that I wrote this with my tounge planted firmly in my cheek. I don't -completely- believe the research about the supposed dangers. I just wanted a chance to post from this thing.
I'd have said it was an appreciation of Irony myself. Etoys was a big butthole about the whole Etoy thing (And Etoy was there first and all...) If the Etoy guys can afford to buy the Etoys domain name and that domain name is for sale, that's a lot different than Etoys suing Etoy out of theirs.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Now I'm confused, they did 17% more business this year than last year but missed estimates of 119% growth. My gawd, what a bunch of fools.
Isn't 17% growth decent anymore? Unrealistic growth is going to be traced to the real cause of the recession. If you grow at 17% a year isn't that enough. What growth is needed to make a viable business?
``Since most solid tumors take 10 to 15 years to develop, it is probably too soon to see an effect,'' Lai said.
I know very little about cancer (except for a bit about Gliomlastoma Multiforme), but experience suggests that there are some quite deadly forms of cancer (brain and otherwise) that take significantly less than a decade to develop.
Some life-threatening tumors can form in less than a month or so, and others in less than six months.
I guess what bothers me, is that I am less concerned about the impact of the 10-15 year growth tumors. That suggests to me that they are very non-aggressive and could be discovered early and effectively treated.
What frightens me are the highly aggressive forms of cancer that that appear out of nowhere, and can cripple or kill someone within six months.
I'm not sure what my point is, really, and I have no reason to doubt Dr. Lai's credentials, but I feel like his closing statement in the article subtly suggests that the risk of cancer is pretty low and if it does strike, it is a slow process.
In some cases, it's not.
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D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
Whoa, that Deathwatch site is some scary stuff. I mean, I expected to see Etoys (death date Apr 1, 2001) and Priceline (death date Mar 18, 2001)...but PSINet (Feb 27, 2001)? MP3.com (May 6, 2001)? Salon (Jan 14, 2001)? Worldgate (Nov 27, 2001)?
You have hundreds of companies listed there. If your predictions are accurate, there really is a recession heading this way, at least in the information/internet sector.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
The damage done? What damage was that? Pulling a lame website down for a few weeks? Have you spent a lot of time reading the insightful commentary at etoy.com since they went back up? It's about 99% Flash.
Its not like etoys was a great developer either, so they used Open Source, and didn't really contribute anything back.
And how would you know this? Do you spend a lot of time working on mod_perl? Do you track the patches to CPAN modules sent in by eToys employees? Did you ask VA Linux or the Apache foundation what they did with the money they received from eToys?
You don't know what you're talking about.
I wonder if they'll be selling off any of that sweet equipment, cheap. I could use a "new" box...
--
Communication is only possible between equals
look at the treatment the west nile virus has received, compared to something like asthma. huge amounts of money were spent to eradicate any possible west nile contamination, because some 'rich' person could be infected. all the while 'poor' asthma sufferers (urban dwellers, where cockroaches cause asthma more) are ignored. this is because poor people are worth less than rich people, so your comment does not take that into account when talking about failing beds (rich people can afford higher quality beds, but use cell phones).
>A study also has a 50% chance
>of finding a non-significant
>correlation between cell phone use
>and below-average penis size.
Now THIS I would buy.
http://www.laural.com/
oh yeah!
cpeterso
Just a note, when the whole etoy/etoys chaos was going on a friend of mine was trying to get a job and one of the places he looked at was etoys. Apparently when he was talking to the person doing the hiring she said that the lawsuit was their major source of publicity. I am glad they went under, on some level they wanted publicity from it all, maybe that was the the only reason they did it at all.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
...is about 12-16 programmers, depending on body weight.
What a load of crap. Just giving people food solves the problem for exactly as long as the food lasts. Just teaching people to produce food allows the population to increase until the food production mechanism no longer keeps pace with the population, again with ghastly results. Much as with welfare here, there is no solution except for creating the vision, infrastructure and methodology for the people to PRODUCE something that the rest of the 'world' will PAY FOR. If you (and "you" can mean an individual, a demographic stratum or most of the population of a nation) do not create VALUE for others then you will never be anything than a charity case.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
Start the bidding at $1 and the first few thousand can dream...
Rodent studies are essentially useless. The human skull is much thicker than that of a rat, and so the amount of radiation transmitted is different. Also, rats don't live nearly as long as humans. Brain tumours that take 10 - 15 years to develop in humans are obviously going to behave differently (if they happen at all) in rodents. You could try to correct for all this, but then you're really getting onto thin ice...
Besides, what causes cancer in rats doesn't necessarily cause cancer in humans. I remember hearing about a study of 226 known rodent carcinogens. Each substance was tested on both rats and mice. Something like 96 were carcinogenic in mice but not in rats, and 50-odd were carcinogenic in rats but not mice. Kinda makes you wonder if rodent studies have any relevancy to humans.
You could also strap phones to monkey heads, but you'd probably run into a lot of trouble there, and it would still take 10 - 15 years. You can't increase power levels to "speed up" the tests or "amplify" the effect because, at some threshold, you start running into significant heating effects that simply aren't an issue at lower levels.
You're giving me a major '80s flashback. What a great flick that was. Alex Cox, if I remember correctly. I was too callow to really appreciate that dialogue, back then. I remember the soundtrack, too -- I burned out a couple of cassette tapes (Pre-MP3 piracy scheme, kids) with repeated listenings.
ha-ha!
-brain
But at least they'll leave behind a nice building.
Ah yes.
Another case of "Live fast. Die Young. Leave a good-looking corpse"
Yes. Golly, I think we can indeed call them portable phones, even cellular phones if you like.
:-)
I thought it was obvious I was being sarcastic. I guess not. My point was that nobody used them nearly as much as people use cell phones now, and the technology is significantly different, so data from them isn't very relevant. Modern cell phones haven't been around as long.
The whole point is that lower power may not indicate less damaging when considering long-term cumulative effects. No question but that some cosmic ray muon zapping through you has more power than a photon from your cellphone, but you get a lot more of those photons and they interact with your tissues very differently. Long-period low-frequency EM exposure and periodic exposure to single high-energy particles are incommensurable quantities. We cannot make any conclusions about the former based on our knowledge of the latter.
Argh, where to start... You missed my point, and you made a few errors. I was trying to compare risks not the actual radiation. Given that background radiation is long-term, is always present, and is ionizing, whereas cell phone radiation is only occasional, it seems likely to be much less dangerous. Also, you confuse energy and power. Power is the rate of energy. Cell phone radiation probably has more power than background radiation, but the individual photons have much less energy, so much less, in fact, that they are not capable of ionizing anything. This means that they can probably only do damage through thermal effects, but half a watt isn't much heat...
Note [snip] that you cannot logically dismiss the possibility out-of-hand on the basis you're claiming.
I admit it is a possibilty, I'm just pointing out that it is so unlikely, and the risk so small, that it shouldn't concern anyone.
Hmm, makes me glad to sleep on a simple futon.
Just wait until you have to move with the damn thing. It will get you then
So you're saying they have to slog through fossil fuel dependency and be our manufacturing bitches until they are worthy to have access to our vaunted technonogy? What condescending crap. Saying that since only .1% of the population is currently online they won't benefit from increased access is like saying since only .1% of them can read (just an example, not a fact) they won't need books or schools.
"When it rains, it pours." --Morton's Salt
"When it rains, it pours." --Morton's Salt
I bet'cha all 226 of those were carcinogenic to humans - ranging from mild to severe. Remember, we're all mammals.
Rats are closely related to mice, yet the study found significant differences in their reactions to suspected carcinogens. Now are humans more closely related to rats than mice are? I don't think so. There are millions of years of evolution seperating us from Rodenta.
You can simulate YEARS of exposure over a course of a couple weeks.
This is so fucking stupid I can't believe it, especially since I explained why this was wrong in my last post. Here's another, simpler explanation for you.
Do you get it now? Many, many things are bad above a certain threshold, but harmless or even beneficial at lower levels (think vitamins). That's why claiming that low, normal levels of X are carcinogenic in humans based on rodent studies with super-high levels is Bad Science.
Examine their methodology.
They're using rodents. We want to know about humans. At best, their results should suggest an area for further research. They don't tell you how humans react to X.
Just because the experiment doesn't cover all cases doesn't mean the results are flawed. In fact, a "patchwork" of studies that covers all cases with a little overlap is more to be trusted than a single monolithic "definitive" answer-type study.
In any case, how on earth could they get the statistical sample for usage of significantly over 3 years?
As for your third flaw--it isn't even a valid point! Unless it is your claim that people who are "potentially developing" tumor or have undiagnosed tumors are somehow over-represented in the mobile-phone-using group? On the contrary, I would expect that the group that owns the mobile phones is also the same groups that can afford the quality doctors who would find serious health problems early on. In other words, I would expect mobile phone usage to have a mild correlation to people who FIND OUT they have brain cancer--the people who can't afford the phones also can't afford the doctors.
--
MailOne
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
I faced a bit of a dilema this holiday shopping season. I wanted to pick up an educational game for younger friend of mine, but couldn't find it locally. Searching the major toystore websites provided me with only etoys carrying the game. As much as i wanted to give this game as a gift, i couldn't bring myself to buy anything from etoys. I was about to give up and look for something else for the young lady, but happened upon a site that carried the game. The site had been down/flooded when i looked earlier, but this time came up. The game was 5 dollars higher at this site than at etoys, and i spent quite a bit on shipping due to finding it at the last minute, but I feel it is money well spent if the money goes to a competitor of etoys. my principles are worth more than 25 bucks, for now atleast. technoid
Two wrongs don't make a right, but 3 lefts do - Lew of GO magazine
but wasn't Glide open source? and wasn't it quite easy to use (better than what was available when it was launched)?
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Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
Funny, my first programming job was at a company that did consulting in the cell phone industry. That was 10 years ago. Yeah, every self-important yuppie scumbag didn't yet have one attached to his or her ear, but they were around.
Yes, which is why you shouldn't compare the two. It's like trying to compare the immediate and obvious effects of being shot in the head with a bullet with the subtle cummulative effects of repeated head contact in sports - the former is obviously a Bad Thing, the latter can be harmless but there's definitely a danger level. Figuring out what that danger level is can be tricky. Risk analysis involves not only the odds of an incident, but the loss per incident. The odds of cell-phone related cancers may seem, based on available data, to be low, but a brain tumor loses real big.Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
In short, we're not hypocrites, as much fun as it may be to paint us that way, as long as you understand our positions.
I don't get it. Electromagnetic waves from cellphones are just photons of energy of several micro-electron-volts (900MHz => 3 micro eV). This is not enough to ionize an atom, not even enough to excite vibration or rotation into a molecule. I mean, visible light is also electromagnetic radiation, with much higher energy than cellphone radiation and I haven't heard of anyone getting brain tumor from being outside too much. Exposure from sunlight is probably much more powerful -- about 0.1 Watts/sq.cm. of skin. Oh well, may be some weird resonant effect on biological tissue, if cellphone EM causes brain tumors indeed.
Thats all we need is a bunch of underskilled H1B visa holders. Stay home and tend to your goats.
Got Code?
The forces at work here aren't _really_ concerned with raising the quality of life. They want to lay the foundation for efficient communication lines. Cheap labor won't always be in the places it is now. It will spread, it will become necessary to keep in close contact with with the factories, plants, etc.
I know, it's paranoid, but I see it coming.
I cannot smoke at work so I do not want you jepordizing my health with your damn cell phone, we need a few more laws.
Got Code?
Ah yes but the second study due out on the eleventh involved soemthing like 2611 paitents many of whom had brain cancer, yet no correlation with cell use (IIRC)
Funny, my first programming job was at a company that did consulting in the cell phone industry. That was 10 years ago.
Can you really call those bricks portable phones? Nobody used them anywhere near as much as people do now, and frequencies and power levels used have changed since then. I should have said modern cell phones, so sue me...
Yes, which is why you shouldn't compare the two.
Um, why not (your analogy sucks, BTW)? If the backround radiation is more damaging/higher power than what cell phones produce, than we can probably ignore the cell phones. There isn't any solid evidence for cell phones causing cancer, nor is there a reasonable mechanism by which low-level non-ionizing radiation could cause cancer. Until somebody comes up with a well-done study showing a strong correlation, I won't worry.
Risk analysis involves not only the odds of an incident, but the loss per incident. The odds of cell-phone related cancers may seem, based on available data, to be low, but a brain tumor loses real big.
A hundred or so people die every year by having their beds collapse on them or through some other mechanical failure while sleeping. Nobody stresses about that, but death is about the biggest loss you can take (and what a way to go). Once the odds of dying (over your lifetime) from a particular cause drop below 1 in 10,000, it's probably not going to worry you, especially since there are better things to stress about. Keep risks in perspective.
It's worth pointing out that, while sometimes the company outlives its cash, the stockholders almost never do. There are a number of ways a cash-short company can stave off bankruptcy, but from a stockholder perspective, they all suck. More on this at Downside if you're interested.
Etoys stock is at 1/4 today, down from a high of 40. If you had invested $1000 in Etoys stock at the high, you would now have $6.25.
Hell, hundreds of engineers have spent the last decade or so in almost continuous cellular radiation at work. I've done IT for labs full of cellular switches and banks of test phones. If cellular radiation was so bad, you'd think they'd notice hordes of completely unprotected cellular engineers dropping dead by now. Why don't they test for brain cancer among that population and an equivalent control and see if something show up at that level?
Then they can see if it's really too dangerous to use on a personal level, or if it's similar to Xrays and only the professionals will have to wear foil helmets.
-- Raven
[again]
cpeterso
Skyrocketing cell phone use in Japan has had one unfortunate effect: Train conductors now make repeated requests to passengers that they refrain from using cell phones while on the train. It seems the signals interfere with medical devices, particularly *pace makers*.
Don't know about other countries, but common Japanese cell phones at any rate are pretty powerful. If you point one at your tv set the screen really takes a fit. Could some lightweight shield in a jacket lining provide significant protection for people whose lives depend on a quiet electromagnetic environment?
Yes, my Riva128 Board ACTUALLY had better visual quality than any of my friend's Voodoo1 boards. It also produced higher frame rates. The Lighting quality was substantially better after a thorough tweaking (stop by tweak3d.net to find out how). It should be noted that Voodoo1's only supported a small sub-set of OpenGL (which was internally tranlated into Glide), while the RIVA128 supported much more of the OpenGL API (with a few important things left out, but those are only used in games as new as Q3:A).
"All warfare is based on deception."
Sun Tzu, "The Art of War"
The real irony with Slashdot dancing on eToys still-empty grave is that eToys is a major customer of VA Linux. You remember them, right? The ones who pay the bills for Slashdot?
Here's the report of eToys at F*ckedCompany
s earch=etoys.com&x=8&y=11
http://www.f---edcompany.com/archives/search.cfm?
The censoring is required to spoof the censorware.
...Really. <g> But at least they'll leave behind a nice building. I drive by it every day on my way to/from work, and I watched as they built it over the last year. If you're near the Westside (West Los Angeles/Santa Monica), and you like the high-tech postmodern architecture look, I'd highly recommend swinging by. It's located on the south side of Olympic Boulevard between Bundy and Centinela. I haven't been inside, so I can't attest for the interior layout, but the exterior is great. If anyone has any information about the building (who designed it, whether it follows sustainability guidelines, etc.), I'd appreciate the info.
"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. I'm all out of bubblegum." MSE USC APX AIA CSI CASp
but wasn't Glide open source?
Yes, it was once released as free software. There was even a project to port it to DJGPP (a DOS version of GCC).
wasn't it quite easy to use (better than what was available when it was launched)?
Glide beat even DirectEcch 5 in just about every way.
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I wonder how much money they might have saved by not pursuing frivolous lawsuits.
i question the entire notion of the west being a role model for third world countries. that third world contries need to take the exact same route to success that we took is indeed pretty stupid.
the facts are that we know these countries have very bad problems that we don't have over here. but we should admit, at least as a starting point, that we have no freakin' clue whatsoever how they should solve their problems. we don't.
i think grass-roots things like Geekcorps are in fact the only way we can help. they don't pretend to have an all-encompassing solution to all problems OR a five year plan on how to change everything. instead, they help where they can and they certainly don't do any damage. which can absolutely not be said for attempts at industrialization - those often did more harm than good.
humility, please. learn from the mistakes of the past.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
Cell phones have never been shown to cause cancer. There's really no reason to think that cell phones might cause cancer. It's all very silly.
Yet I'd suggest that the majority of slashdot readers believed the phone-cancer link. Why would smart people fall for something like this?
My guess: They like to think they know secret information that others don't know. This superiority is more important to them than being correct.
I agree that there are much more important problems in Ghana than lack of internet access.
Then why is this happening?
I think that in this case, big business sees the internet as a cultural thing more than infrastructure. They think of it like McDonalds or Mickey Mouse. Its a product. And the best part is that the product itself brings only ads and new-fangled ways to buy and fetishize other products. The introduction of the internet is only a tool to ensure the 'emerging' nations have the consumer mindset.
Just some ideas...
peas,
-Kabloona
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
Jumping to Conclusions.
It looks only at people who are already diagnosed with brain tumors, and not those [...]whose tumors go undiagnosed. It might be hard to get a statistically significant number of people with undiagnosed brain tumors for a study...
I was born and grew up in Zambia...
After college I plan to go back and teach computer science. And here's why.
People in American businesses don't use computers because it's fun or because they like the pretty graphics. People use computers because at a very fundamental level they allow you to do business more efficiently. Cheaper, faster, better...
In Africa we don't just need food and medicine for the needs of today. We need to plan ahead. To create a sustainable business infrastructure so we can compete on a global market place.
The things you mentioned are a part of this. Computers are another part.
Think about this for a second. In 1995 you couldn't assume by default that people had email addresses. But email has become necesary for business today.
Today there are still people who can't type faster than they can write by hand. Tomorrow we will assume by default that any educated person can type faster than they can write and at least do some basic programming.
Computers aren't caviar, they're water... You just can't do business with out them.
The wording of that statement is a little confusing to me, but in any case it doesn't sound like the study was limited to 2-hour-per-month users.
However, if I may go off on a rant here, the thing I don't understand about this issue is why anybody actually cares, other than to get into arguments at cocktail parties and here on Slashdot. If you are worried about your cell phone causing cancer, then don't use it, or use it less, or get a phone with lower emissions levels. I suppose if we eventually discover that cell-phone use increases the risk of developing a brain tumor by 2%, lots of people will run around screaming and decide to stop using them -- even though many of those same people would (were there no cancer risk) happily chat on their cell phone while driving, an activity that probably causes an order-of-magnitude increase in the likelihood of an accident. Or maybe Congress will pass legislation so that every U.S. cell-phone buyer will get a Surgeon General's warning, like a pack of cigarettes... every time you turn it, and once every six hours thereafter, the display will say "Warning: Using this device may be hazardous to your health. If you agree to accept this risk, press SEND to continue."
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
The average number of years of cellphone use among participants is only 3 years.
The study covers analog phones, not the newer digital models, which may produce different effects.
It looks only at people who are already diagnosed with brain tumors, and not those who may be potentially developing them or whose tumors go undiagnosed.
The news is good for those of us who are using cellphones regardless of their possible consequences, but it's disappointing that better studies aren't being conducted. We need a study that looks at longer-term use (say 6 years) and which keeps up to date with the latest devices the same way the general population is doing. Unfortunately, such proper studies are years off.
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It worries me to see that companies such as Shell and BT are contributing funds to send IT technicians there, when what we should be doing is sending agricultural experts and trying to attract magnates of industry.
As the west moves towards an increasingly service based economy, there are opportunities for countries such as Ghana to grab onto our coattails and provide our manufacturing capabilty, before moving up to join us.
Lets not do things back to front here.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
I must first state that I am not a native Zambian. I was born there and have lived there for most of my life and in many ways consider it my home. But I have an American passport.
As an American in Zambia I was raised never to state any political views whether negative or positive about Zambian affairs. I still feel this is a wise rule to live by.
However, if there is one thing that I wish America would do to help Zambia it would be to forgive all the debt that Zambia accumulated in the 1980's. They already have forgiven around 2 billion but there is still 6.5 billion that Zambia owes. About half to the IMF. 6.5 billion dollars is not a lot of money for the United States but for a country of 9 million people where the average person makes $300 a year it is an impossible amount.
The average zambian should not be held responsible for this because they only recieved a tiny fraction of this money.
One thing I'm gratefull for is that when Zambia had a terrible drought in the mid 1990's America sent a lot of food to us. Otherwise many people would have starved.
Your the man I surrender....d'oh sorry!
CORRECTED: You're the man. I surrender....d'oh sorry!
cpeterso
half baked gogglebox doogooders telling everybody it's bad for you. .
pernicious nonsense.
a guy could take a hundred chest xrays a year.
ought ta have em too. .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
what do you think something like that would sell for? Do you think any normal person could ever purchase it?
I am the BOOGER, Koo Koo Kachoo!!!
As I was driving home from work today, there was a piece on NPR about the (lack of any ) link between cell phones and cancer. The MD interviewed stated there was no link between cell phones, the amount of time one used one (mins/day), an increase in temporal lobe cancer (thats the part of the brain where the cell phone goes, or even a correlation between the side of the head a user held the phone to and an increased risk. Research is out in this months JAMA, with the results of a different study (same result, no correlation) due out in the New England JM on January 11th. However, he did say that no long term (over ten years) are as yet available.
http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2000/ 12/18/151138/41
Feel free to add your insight to the discussion there as well because I never thought of India as a good example until reading what you posted.
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
They needed that 119% growth to break even. Like most other .com's, they are running out of the money they raised in their IPO, but they still need to pay the bills.
Because their profit margins are razor thin, the only way to get enough money to stop the cash-burn is to sell lots of stuff.
That's how they do their estimates of growth: How much growth do we need to break even? 115%? Okay, well if we grow 119%, then we will even make a profit - lets say we are going to do that. Obviously, it has as much resemblance to reality as their initial stock price.
I had my Voodoo3 2 months before the TNT2 came out. Thats why I bought it, becasue I couldn' wait.
-- the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer.
Are you still at risk for cancer if you have a permanant mounted phone where the antenna is far from your head?
[ ]
Let's assume for a second that nVidia doesn't completly kill off 3dfx. nVidia doesn't make boards, just the chips. They sell the chips elsewhere and go through all that licencing and other stuff that goes along with it. 3dfx did the same back in its heyday. 3dfx bought up STB, makers of arguably the best RIVA128 and RIVATNT boards, so it could quit the licencing and chipselling gig. I'm sure the idea sounded appealing. Take out a competetor's major bedfellow and gain some factories to boot. They would have STB as an in-house fab gig. They could also take stabs at some of the companies that made deals with both companies - Canopus, Hercules/Guilemot, etc.
Now in a bizarre twist of fate, nVidia sweeps in and cuts 3dfx's head off. nVidia stuck to the chip-selling and licencing guns, and out shot a self-wounded chip designer, aquiring the technologies, patents, STB (what's left of it, which isn't much), and of course, the trademarked brandname "3dfx" which may very well be the heart of this deal.
So like I said, let's assume nVidia cauterizes 3dfx's wounds. First of all, I doubt that nVidia won't be changing its plans just yet. It will still be in the chip-selling/licencing thing. But with another company that can make boards for them, on top of all their bedfellows (ASUS, Hercules, et al.), they'll be much stiffer competition for the contendors that do both chip design and board manufacturing. ATI has been wanting to step up in the 3D market, but still has a foothold all over the mobile video and OEM markets, and there's always been Matrox who has its niches (and some decent 3D hardware to boot, although they don't have much to compete with the GeForce2). Even though ATI and Matrox don't have anything that really matches up with a GeForce2Ultra, they're much bigger, and diverse that nVidia or 3dfx ever are/were. This is why 3dfx died - it wanted to go head to head with the larger beasts but didn't have much to strike with.
I would go as far as to say maybe we should expect to see 3dfx boards with NV chips at their core. After all, the 3dfx is a trusted name in the industry. I doubt we'll see it die out completly, but it definitly won't be what it once was.
I'd been using my old Canopus Voodoo2 for days. The on-board Fan (cutting edge at the time!) made horrible sounds, and driver stability sucked - the reference drivers sucked because Canopus tweaked with the Ref. design, and Canopus sucked for refuseing to release updated drivers after they ditched the 3D Market (they still make Video Editing hardware, but I've heard rumors they'll be pursuing the 3D market again with nVidia). Still, it played Q3A (for half-an hour at best, but hey it was better than my Canopus TNT board). My parents bought me a GeForce2MX board, and I haven't looked back. That MX chip is something else, lemme tell ya. For the price, it sure packs one badass rendered punch. I'll tell ya, I was almost tempted to grab a Voodoo5 5000, but I wanted to do more homework on it. Found something on SharkeyExtreme that showed every GF2MX chip outperformed the V5 hands down, and every board costed at least $50 less than a V5.
Wow, am I glad I did my homework. Half-Life at 1024x768 pumped out of a Pentium II 266. Never once thought that could happen. 800x600x32 in Q3:A, now (tho a bit glitchy at 25-40 FPS - I'll bet a Mobo/Processor upgrade'd fix that up-GF2MX likes AGP 2.0, and my crummy 440LX Mobo is too damn old). I was only doin 640x480x16 with my V2 (25FPS at Best! HA!).
Kagenin
"All warfare is based on deception."
Sun Tzu, "The Art of War"
STB was one of nVidia's best players. My old STB Riva128 board (the 4 Megger, not the 8 Megger) could outperform every one of my friend's Voodoo1 boards at Quake2. They also had the best Vanilla TNT board out there - I almost grabbed one (and rue the day I settled on a crummy Canopus TNT board).
The V3 Made it into Dell's systems because that's just about the only perk it had in aquiring STB - its OEM contracts. STB was OEMing to Dell and Gateway among others. My system's an almost 5 year old Gateway that had a 4 Meg STB RIVA128 board in it. Of course it's only a P2-266MHz, hardly a powerhouse anymore, despite the recent video upgrade to a Hercules GeForce2MX board.
Kagenin
"All warfare is based on deception."
Sun Tzu, "The Art of War"
It's true that digital phones use less power, however, while some companies run them on the regular cell frequencies (800mhz), all of the new PCS providers use 1900mhz. This could potentially make a big difference in health.
Indeed, scientists have known for years that laboratory testing causes cancer in rats.
I am from Nigeria (about 600km from Ghana - for the geographicaly challenged). Some points I noted in the thread; 'Poor' countries are different 'poor' countries do not need IT. The web and computers as a whole has several orders of magnitude more improvement potential for counries like Ghana than for heavily industrialised countries like the US. The trend I notice from contributions is that 'poor' countries should start with black and white tv then poor quality color broadcast and maybe sometime in the future progress to the present day tv standards (computerwise of course) is enlightining seeing how enlighten geeks think.
inyang
wait...maybe if the geekcorps volunteered at etoys by selling 3dfx cards and cell phones, we could pull this .com back into the black!
.com'S!
and maybe not.
ITS RAINING
The anti-salmon
I agree, 3 years of exposure is totally insufficient to draw conclusions from.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
..because my Banshee is mediocre at OpenGL, and horrible at Direct3D. Glide, however, runs beautifully.
Like I've said before in my previous posts, is NVidia just letting Glide die off?
The "digital divide" is only a North American term, where our concept of poverty is much different than the rest of the world. We need to get our priorities straight.
If I were a cell manufacturer, I'd include a statement with every phone: "There is an as-yet-indeterminant risk of literally frying your brain if you hold this device to your head when using it. If you want to be safer, we suggest you either use a headset, or purchase one of our expensive new Bluetooth-enabled phones with a snazzy wireless headset. If you ignore our warning and develop noggin rot, it's your own damned fault." It would have to be put in more genteel and dense legalese, but words to this effect. (Of course, when voters aren't responsible for not punching their ballots, this may or may not save them from liability ...)
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
"... and that mean slashdot site. They keep picking on us, and global warming! It affected out sales! Yeah, that's the ticket! And.. my dog ate all the orders! My car broke down! I had to go out of town, There was an earthquake! A terrible flood! Locusts! IT WASN'T OUR FAULT!!! *whine* *whine*"
Or, another dot.bomb with no business plan? You decide.
Ok first Cancer is a genetic thing. People smoke for fity years and dont get it. Someone else smokes for 10 years and dies. Same with cell phones. There are very few environmental factors for cancer.
Second, the etoys coment :
It'd be delicious irony if the folks running the Etoy domain they sued a while back bought their domain name
isn't this typical slashdot hypocacy? We dont like patents --- but opensource licensing is ok. We like opensource and dont like propriatory software but napster is ok. And we dont like etoys getting someone elses site, but someone else can get theirs and its ok.
I know its borderline flamebait but it has to be said.
On some level I agree. I'm not sure how things are in Ghana, but if people are starving and dying of cureable diseases at a high rate, that should certainly have a high priority.
OTOH, holding the high end down generally *doesn't* pull the low end up. Many people made arguments similar to yours during the Apollo Moon missions. I dare say that if it weren't for the tremendous ammount of "spinoff" research associated with the space race, we might not be surfing Slashdot and having this discussion today and the economy might be a lot worse.
Also, there is no need for 3rd world development to parallel the development of the west by evolving through the industrial revolution to the technical. This has been demonstrated by the quick adoption of wireless technology in some countries--bypassing the copper stage of the communications industry.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
i dont know. i like the idea of a slow painful death. there's nothing like having your body eat itself from inside out.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
We (The Danish University of Agriculture) has a large number of students from developing countries, including Ghana. This is paid for mostly by foreign aid programs. I.e. we are helping to create native experts. We also have research programs in various devoloping nations, in order to finding ways to improve crop production using the locally available means, often paid through the same programs.
However, one problem is that we lose contact with out students once they graduate, so we can't use them to distribute information about new methods from the research programs to the national farming communities. An IT network would help them to stay in touch with us, and thus up to date with the research. It will also make it easier for them to use the specialized expertice of our people, and vice-versa.
I'm an international development professional currently working in Egypt on a girls' education project. At other phases of my career I have worked on microcredit and small business development, all fairly "traditional" development interventions.
So do I think bringing IT to developing countries a waste of resources? Absolutely not. In fact, in my judgement, it is the single most important unmet need in international development today. Why? Because IT poses both a significant danger and a wonderful opportunity for the economies of these countries.
The developing world does not need an industrial revolution in the sense that we experienced it in the West. The world no longer works that way. Someone mentioned the automobile industry, and this is actually a great example of what I am talking about.
Go to a local new car dealer and pick a car -- any car, of any make or model. Take it apart and organize the parts by country of origin. You will have a great many piles of parts, and I will be very surprised if you find that more than 40% of them are from any one country. Certainly you will not find that most of the parts in that car came from the car's country of "manufacture." On top of that, many of the parts will be composed of raw materials from another country entirely.
Take apart the same make and model that came off the production line six months earlier, and I expect you will find many of the parts are from different countries than they were in the first car you took apart. You will also have a really pissed-off car lot owner.
This is basically just comparative advantage taken to extreme. We can take it to these extremes because we have transportation and communication technology that makes it feasible for a producer of a big ticket item like a car to get bids from all over the world for parts that meet its specifications and transport them quickly and reliably to the place of manufacture. This ability in turn creates pressure on the car manufacturer to do just that, because if it is not searching far and wide to save money on components, its competitors will.
As we've seen from the recent B2B boom on the Internet, the same resources are now becoming available and affordable to manufacturers of less complex, less expensive goods.
So does it make sense to start a Ghanaian car industry? Probably not. But it might make sense to produce particular components of cars, computers, and other goods that Ghanaian manufacturers are well-positioned to produce.
But without access to the kinds of technologies that would allow (in this example) Ghanaian producers to communicate directly with potential customers and competitors to determine specifications and market prices, and to make sales, such an industry is impossible. And Ghanaian producers could not hope to match the efficiencies of, say, Taiwanese producers, without access to IT.
On the other hand, with access to what are now relatively inexpensive information technologies, producers in developing countries have an unprecedented opportunity to compete with the big boys without having their huge capital investment. You've seen the IBM commercial where the Japanese company gets a bid from a small producer in Texas? Well, that producer could just as well be in Accra, or Cairo, or Almaty. If the technology is available in those places.
The same is true even for unprocessed agricultural commodities. These are traditionally exported through middlemen based in the developed world. But with modern communication technologies, developing-country producers can access those markets and make contacts directly, improving the prices it can get for those commodities. The flip side to this is that without those technologies, the need for middlemen either will price the commodity out of the market or will provide the producer with an even smaller return for its goods.
There are many other excellent arguments for promoting IT in developing countries, but for me this is the killer, and it is not specific to one class of countries. All countries have an interest in the forces that move export markets. Haiti exports. Burma exports. Ethiopia exports. With access to the modern tools that have transformed the Western economy over the last 5-10 years, they could have a chance at a better economic situation than ever before. Without access to those technologies, they're trapped.
-
-
Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
Ok, I am Mr. Technology-Skeptical Curmudgeon,
I have always sort of thought that if rich "western" countries want to help "underdeveloped" countries, they should do it in a way that is the least interfering. E.g., simply giving money to the country to let *it* figure out what it wants to do (yes, yes, that is given a somewhat democratic non-corrupt government...). This is as opposed to forcing the government to adopt certain policies, or letting western industry come in to exploit and pollute the country.
Being a native Zambian...what are your opinions on this sort of imperialistic industrialization of underdeveloped countries? I don't know much about Zambia, or other African nations, but Africa was once host to large and prosperous civilizations. Why, in the last few hundred years, has Africa appeared to devolve into a "third world" state?
I ask these questions, because as people of non-western underdeveloped states, some unfortunately on the recieving end of western "help", know, there are significant trade-offs and certainly penalties for allowing western influence and control, and embracing the global economy. Is the west wrongheadedly (or in many cases intentionally) influencing poorer countries for the worse, or for their own benefit, or to remake them in its image? Or am I just a crank, and the west is really percieved as some saintly benefactor who is just enriching and saving these countries?
(Yes, I use a lot of quotes around things that people have inherent assumptions about but probably shouldn't)
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I'm afraid of what these companies are really trying to do. The whole bent of the story isn't how third world countries are developing their own tech industries, they're simply learning how to do simple tech tasks from the GeekCorps. This helps create a new semi-skilled labor force. When they need people to crunch some html, they can establish the digital equivelent of sweatshops in these countries.
Think I'm being paranoid? Ever seen the sweatshops in Tiajuana? "Assembled in Mexico" is becoming a regular label on many goods sold in the US.
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
----RANT----
i kinda wish that long term exposure to cell phones did cause cancer. then all the fscking people could focus more on their driving than the oh so important conversation that cannot wait until they are at their destination.
i understand that sometimes it's necessary for people to get in touch with you, but it really pisses me off when i'm sitting in a class and i hear someones cellphone go off.
if i'm ever a professor, i'll state on the first day of class that the person who forgets to turn off thier cell phone (or what ever it is that people are using then) will be failed.
----/RANT----
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
jafac's quoting one of the greatest movies ever, "Repo Man".
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Parnell: I go to Utah every year. Friend of mine was the designer of the MX missile racetrack basing mode. A hundred thousand miles of railroad track in a big loop through Utah, Arizona, and Nevada. Bombs were going to hide in locomotive sheds. That way, the red team would never know exactly where they were. I still go out to Utah, just to think about the way things might have been.
Otto: Sir, I represent the Helping Hand Acceptance Corporation, and....
Parnell: Radiation, yes indeed. You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked gogglebox do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you. Pernicious nonsense! Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year. They oughta have them too. When they cancelled the project it almost did me in. One day my mind was literally bursting. The next day nothing, swept away. But I'll show them. I had a lobotomy in the end.
Otto: Lobotomy? Isn't that for loonies?
Parnell: Not at all. Friend of mine had one. Designer of the neutron bomb. Did you ever hear of the neutron bomb? Destroys people, but leaves buildings standing. Fits in a suitcase, so small, no one knows it's there until Blammo! Eyes melt, skin explodes, everybody dead! It's so immoral working on the thing, it can drive you mad. That's what happened to this friend of mine. So, he had a lobotomy. Now he's well again.
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