One of the most valuable services you can provide is your collective clue, available at a meat-space location. Some of the other suggestions (providing virtualization support, teaching classes on various aspects of computing, security hygiene), are great ideas and will definitely help the community.
An actual physical place where people with an interest in computing and hacking (in the good sense of course) can just gather, work, bounce ideas off each other and help the community, is rare, and something the web can't provide. Having a group like that SIPB was invaluable to me, when I was an undergraduate, by being a concentration of people with such interests. And since we were located right next to the main computer cluster/lab, we were also able to help other members of the community on a wide range of computing topics.
It was so bad technically. The astronut survived in Mars by growing food in a greenhouse, which was in a tent that was flapping in the wind? Sure, that's likely to happen.
Luckily, I didn't have to pay for it as MIT's student movie theater, LSC showed it as a sneak preview, just before its release, IIRC.
OpenPGP is a standard implemented by a few programs including PGP (non-free), and GnuPG (aka GPG) (Free). GnuPG support is either integrated into or supported via plugins on Kmail, Eudora, Mutt, Outlook, and many other clients. See http://www.gnupg.org/(en)/related_software/fronten ds.html
for more details. There are a couple of Mac related links there.
About the last two, GPG's privacy lies in the key,
and thus you wouldn't want anyone else to be able to use your key -- they could sign messages as you otherwise. A hackish way to use GPG with these would be to manually use gpg to sign (and possibly encrypt a message) on the commandline, and then pasting them in.
Someone could write client side code for dealing with webmail (Browser plugins that allow one to replace the current contents of a text input field
with a signed message, but they could easily be
security holes if not written correctly).
Here is the English translation of the constitution of Fifth Republic, France's current constitution, written in 1958. Last time I looked at it, I couldn't find any free speech clause. (Some of France's earlier constitutions had such clauses though).
Or maybe the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which does have a free speech clause, and is a principle as mentioned in the Preamble to the French Constitution, has legal binding. I don't know.
You should also note that France heavily restricted the use (not just the export) of crypto for a long time, (except possibly if you deposited your keys with the government), so I really doubt their commitment to computer freedom per se.
The simputer wasn't designed for the First world
on
Simputer Available?
·
· Score: 1
It might be a useless toy for you, but keep in mind that the Simputer was designed specifically for India, not for Europe or the first world.
India has widespread CDMA coverage (and also GSM coverage).
Bluetooth and infrared are nice if your PDA needs to talk to other computers/other electric gadgets. The target audience (villagers in rural India) are not likely to have any electronic goods other than maybe a TV or radio.
Wifi is neat if you're a few hundred feet (at most) from a wireless access point,and useless otherwise. Most of the third world is not a few hundred feet from a wireless access point.
1: India gives developmental assistance (mostly to neighboring countries like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bhutan).
2: It's a creditor to the IMF (International Monetary Fund).
3: It's written off loans for some desparately poor countries (mostly in Africa).
4: Foreign Aid is a very small part of India's GDP, at least when compared to Israel and Egypt. It's symbolic for India more than anything else.
5: America _now_ accounts for an insignificant amount of India's foreign aid:
"The United States accounted for 8.6 percent of all of the aid India received from independence through FY 1988, but for only 0.7 percent in FY 1989 and 0.6 percent in FY 1990." source
Energy is expensive. ARM cpus are energy efficient
on
State Of The Simputer
·
· Score: 1
Electricity is more expensive in third world countries. Older computers are quite energy inefficient for their speed. The ARM chip, used in simputers, was designed to be a low power device, thus lowering the running costs of the machine.http://www.slashdot.org/
3 of the 10 daily English language newspapers with the largest circulation are in India (The Times Of India is the most circulated English language newspaper _worldwide_, and oh about 10% of India's population understand it reasonably well. They're not particularly pro-war.
And there's good ol' Canada up to the north. I hear that they have a lot of English speakers.
And there's also South Africa, the Phillipines, Pakistan, Ireland, and New Zealand if you want other countries with sizable English speaking populations.
Many other countries have English newspapers that are online.
India hasn't been very supportive the war, but they haven't been as vehemently against it as France, Germany, or the Muslim world, so you might want to try checking out an Indian newspaper, such as The Times Of India , The Hindu, The Indian Express, The Statesman, or Rediff Online. These are amongst the world's most circulated English dailies (The Times of India is #1, the Hindu and the Statesman are in the top 10.), and with the exception of Rediff, have been around in print form for decades.
According to Hinduism, a day of Brahma is equivalent to 100 human years and the world is about 4 billion years old. However, it doesn't say that God took 6 days to create the world or anything like that...
One national Language - Hindi, spoken by 30% of population, mainly in North India. It is an Indo-European language of the Indo-Aryan sub-branch, understood by about half of the population, primarily northern Indian speakers of closely related Indo-Aryan languages. Hindi is unrelated to the Dravidian languages of southern India (e.g. Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu) spoken by about 25% of India's population.
One associate language - English, spoken as a second language by about the elite 10% of the population, throughout India.
The following are the other official languages of India:
Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati, Malayalam, Kannada, Oriya, Punjabi, Assamese, Kashmiri, Sindhi, and Sanskrit (in order of native speakers in India, and yes there are native speakers of Sanskrit.)
Nepali, Konkani, and Manipuri are also official languages, but they became so relatively recently, and I'm not sure of their exact number of native language speakers, though they all probably have less than 20 million native speakers in India.
In addition there are many other languages spoken in India. Click here for a list of Indian languages with more than a million native speakers
The Simputer is actually designed by a trust, the Simputer Trust, which leased out the design to companies who might be interested in manufacturing it. Their motivation in having liberal license policies is to promote hardware development, allowing Simputer users to benefit.
Technically, this is neither Open Source according to the Open Source Initiative's definition, , which says: "The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.", and companies producing designs have to pay a licensing fee of $25,000 if they're from developing nations or $250,000 if they're from richer nations.
It also isn't Free, according to the Free Software Foundation's definition, for the same reason.
However, given the differences between hardware and software development (and manufacture), it's very reasonable and not surprising that a free hardware license won't count as free/open source software, and is definitely in the same spirit as the open source movement, and inspired by the free software movement as well.
According to preliminary Indian Census 2001 results, India's literacy rate is 65%, ranging from 45% to > 90% , with literacy rates amongst the under 24 population significantly higher than amongst the older generation (up to 20% higher in the least literate states). In about 10 years, India's literacy rate will nearly be 80% with literacy rates above 90% in several states.
The number of illiterates in India has declined in absolute terms in the past decade, and thanks to both declining birth rates and increasing literacy rates, this will continue.
But what will the _literate_ farmers do with internet abled computers?
Check the prices of crops, and increase their income by avoiding the middleman.
Get weather forecasts, thanks to the Indian government's investment in satellite, imaging, and remote sensing technology.
Buy supplies online from companies at a cheaper rate than traditional middlemen.
Communicate with relatives in other states, and other countries more quickly, cheaply, and reliably than via "snail mail". Internet cafe's have started springing up in smaller towns and the Indian government is building a fiber backbone along the Indian Railway's right of way, which will make it easy for > 90% of Indians to get net access.
Communicate with Indian bureaucracy with much less pain.
1) It costs a lot to ship them there. Probably
more than they are worth
2) The older they are, the more power they
consume per processing unit. The StrongARM
processor was designed to consume very little
energy. And electricity is more expensive in
India than it is in the US (though possibly
around the same price as it is in Europe).
India has some oil, but has to import ~ 80%
of it from foreign countries, mainly in the
Middle East.
If you're looking for another easy to install and use Debian
based distro, try Progeny, mentioned here
less than two weeks ago.
You can download ISO's and also read the instructions for upgrading from Potato (Debian r2.2) here.
Disclaimer: I haven't tried it yet (due to a lack of time).
Every additional country (or hopefully in the near future, company) with satellite launch
capability means more
competition in the space industry. More competition in the space launch industry means lower prices, and a reasonable chance that normal people will be able to travel to space in our lifetime.
Having the ability to leave this planet might be the only thing that saves the human race if the ability of the Earth becomes destroyed by: asteroidal or comet impacts; solar fluctuation ; environmental devastation due to human stupidity; {nuclear,chemical,biological} warfare; etc.
They didn't make it easier, but simply recentered
the scores, thereby making it far easier for people to get scores at the top. These days, it is now possible to get an 800 in math or verbal and still have mistakes. Discrimination (in the sense of selection, not racial discrimination) at the top level of intellect became far more difficult, though many would argue that it is not needed at the highest levels of "intelligence" or whatever the SATs measure.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the most valuable services you can provide is your collective clue, available at a meat-space location. Some of the other suggestions (providing virtualization support, teaching classes on various aspects of computing, security hygiene), are great ideas and will definitely help the community. An actual physical place where people with an interest in computing and hacking (in the good sense of course) can just gather, work, bounce ideas off each other and help the community, is rare, and something the web can't provide. Having a group like that SIPB was invaluable to me, when I was an undergraduate, by being a concentration of people with such interests. And since we were located right next to the main computer cluster/lab, we were also able to help other members of the community on a wide range of computing topics.
Already did so 3 years back :-)
But you have at least 1 gig of reliable backed up storage that's web servable. I've been near or over quota for almost 8 years now :-)
It was so bad technically. The astronut survived in Mars by growing food in a greenhouse, which was in a tent that was flapping in the wind? Sure, that's likely to happen.
Luckily, I didn't have to pay for it as MIT's student movie theater, LSC showed it as a sneak preview, just before its release, IIRC.
OpenPGP is a standard implemented by a few programs including PGP (non-free), and GnuPG (aka GPG) (Free). GnuPG support is either integrated into or supported via plugins on Kmail, Eudora, Mutt, Outlook, and many other clients. See http://www.gnupg.org/(en)/related_software/fronten ds.html
for more details. There are a couple of Mac related links there.
About the last two, GPG's privacy lies in the key,
and thus you wouldn't want anyone else to be able to use your key -- they could sign messages as you otherwise. A hackish way to use GPG with these would be to manually use gpg to sign (and possibly encrypt a message) on the commandline, and then pasting them in.
Someone could write client side code for dealing with webmail (Browser plugins that allow one to replace the current contents of a text input field
with a signed message, but they could easily be
security holes if not written correctly).
How about X-Lindows? I mean, it's should be sufficiently different for Microsoft not to claim trademark confusion :-)
French constitution
Or maybe the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which does have a free speech clause, and is a principle as mentioned in the Preamble to the French Constitution, has legal binding. I don't know.
You should also note that France heavily restricted the use (not just the export) of crypto for a long time, (except possibly if you deposited your keys with the government), so I really doubt their commitment to computer freedom per se.
It might be a useless toy for you, but keep in mind that the Simputer was designed specifically for India, not for Europe or the first world.
India has widespread CDMA coverage (and also GSM coverage).
Bluetooth and infrared are nice if your PDA needs to talk to other computers/other electric gadgets. The target audience (villagers in rural India) are not likely to have any electronic goods other than maybe a TV or radio.
Wifi is neat if you're a few hundred feet (at most) from a wireless access point,and useless otherwise. Most of the third world is not a few hundred feet from a wireless access point.
India is a town in Maryland? I never knew that....
Or maybe the headline was supposed to have been
Evoting in India and Maryland
Yes, India shouldn't get aid, since:
1: India gives developmental assistance (mostly to neighboring countries like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bhutan).
2: It's a creditor to the IMF (International Monetary Fund).
3: It's written off loans for some desparately poor countries (mostly in Africa).
4: Foreign Aid is a very small part of India's GDP, at least when compared to Israel and Egypt. It's symbolic for India more than anything else.
5: America _now_ accounts for an insignificant amount of India's foreign aid:
"The United States accounted for 8.6 percent of all of the aid India received from independence through FY 1988, but for only 0.7 percent in FY 1989 and 0.6 percent in FY 1990." source
Electricity is more expensive in third world countries. Older computers are quite energy inefficient for their speed. The ARM chip, used in simputers, was designed to be a low power device, thus lowering the running costs of the machine.http://www.slashdot.org/
According to a person on the scene, the Gnome Exterminators had "KDE" written on
their backpacks.
I second the parent. Kuwait has an excellent GSM service, and as one British writer noted a few days ago, he got reception in parts of southern Iraq.
Why not expand on what works?
On the other hand, I wonder what standards Iran, Jordan, Syria, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia use....
Uhhh, India.
3 of the 10 daily English language newspapers with the largest circulation are in India (The Times Of India is the most circulated English language newspaper _worldwide_, and oh about 10% of India's population understand it reasonably well. They're not particularly pro-war.
And there's good ol' Canada up to the north. I hear that they have a lot of English speakers.
And there's also South Africa, the Phillipines, Pakistan, Ireland, and New Zealand if you want other countries with sizable English speaking populations.
Many other countries have English newspapers that are online.
India hasn't been very supportive the war, but they haven't been as vehemently against it as France, Germany, or the Muslim world, so you might want to try checking out an Indian newspaper, such as The Times Of India , The Hindu, The Indian Express, The Statesman, or Rediff Online. These are amongst the world's most circulated English dailies (The Times of India is #1, the Hindu and the Statesman are in the top 10.), and with the exception of Rediff, have been around in print form for decades.
According to Hinduism, a day of Brahma is equivalent to 100 human years and the world is about 4 billion years old. However, it doesn't say that God took 6 days to create the world or anything like that...
For deploying google at defense or defense contractors' internal networks, seems likely.
Actually, it's like this:
One national Language - Hindi, spoken by 30% of population, mainly in North India. It is an Indo-European language of the Indo-Aryan sub-branch, understood by about half of the population, primarily northern Indian speakers of closely related Indo-Aryan languages. Hindi is unrelated to the Dravidian languages of southern India (e.g. Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu) spoken by about 25% of India's population.
One associate language - English, spoken as a second language by about the elite 10% of the population, throughout India.
The following are the other official languages of India:
Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati, Malayalam, Kannada, Oriya, Punjabi, Assamese, Kashmiri, Sindhi, and Sanskrit (in order of native speakers in India, and yes there are native speakers of Sanskrit.)
Nepali, Konkani, and Manipuri are also official languages, but they became so relatively recently, and I'm not sure of their exact number of native language speakers, though they all probably have less than 20 million native speakers in India.
In addition there are many other languages spoken in India. Click
here for a list of Indian languages with more than a million native speakers
The Simputer is actually designed by a trust, the Simputer Trust, which leased out the design to companies who might be interested in manufacturing it. Their motivation in having liberal license policies is to promote hardware development, allowing Simputer users to benefit.
Technically, this is neither Open Source according to the Open Source Initiative's definition, , which says: "The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.", and companies producing designs have to pay a licensing fee of $25,000 if they're from developing nations or $250,000 if they're from richer nations.
It also isn't Free, according to the Free Software Foundation's
definition, for the same reason.
However, given the differences between hardware and software development (and manufacture), it's very reasonable and not surprising that a free hardware license won't count as free/open source software, and is definitely in the same spirit as the open source movement, and inspired by the free software movement as well.
Related Links:
SGPL vs GPL
Simputer Licensing terms
Hotmail has been putting advertising footers for years. Egroups puts banner adds on the bottom of all messages going through their mailing lists.
According to preliminary Indian Census 2001 results, India's literacy rate is 65%, ranging from 45% to > 90% , with literacy rates amongst the under 24 population significantly higher than amongst the older generation (up to 20% higher in the least literate states). In about 10 years, India's literacy rate will nearly be 80% with literacy rates above 90% in several states.
The number of illiterates in India has declined in absolute terms in the past decade, and thanks to both declining birth rates and increasing literacy rates, this will continue.
But what will the _literate_ farmers do with internet abled computers?
Check the prices of crops, and increase their income by avoiding the middleman.
Get weather forecasts, thanks to the Indian government's investment in satellite, imaging, and remote sensing technology.
Buy supplies online from companies at a cheaper rate than traditional middlemen.
Communicate with relatives in other states, and other countries more quickly, cheaply, and reliably than via "snail mail". Internet cafe's have started springing up in smaller towns and the Indian government is building a fiber backbone along the Indian Railway's right of way, which will make it easy for > 90% of Indians to get net access.
Communicate with Indian bureaucracy with much less pain.
The problems with donating old computers are:
1) It costs a lot to ship them there. Probably more than they are worth
2) The older they are, the more power they consume per processing unit. The StrongARM processor was designed to consume very little energy. And electricity is more expensive in India than it is in the US (though possibly around the same price as it is in Europe). India has some oil, but has to import ~ 80% of it from foreign countries, mainly in the Middle East.
If you're looking for another easy to install and use Debian based distro, try Progeny, mentioned here less than two weeks ago.
You can download ISO's and also read the instructions for upgrading from Potato (Debian r2.2) here.
Disclaimer: I haven't tried it yet (due to a lack of time).
Every additional country (or hopefully in the near future, company) with satellite launch capability means more competition in the space industry. More competition in the space launch industry means lower prices, and a reasonable chance that normal people will be able to travel to space in our lifetime.
Having the ability to leave this planet might be the only thing that saves the human race if the ability of the Earth becomes destroyed by: asteroidal or comet impacts; solar fluctuation ; environmental devastation due to human stupidity; {nuclear,chemical,biological} warfare; etc.
They didn't make it easier, but simply recentered the scores, thereby making it far easier for people to get scores at the top.
These days, it is now possible to get an 800 in math or verbal and still have mistakes. Discrimination (in the sense of selection,
not racial discrimination) at the top level of intellect became far more difficult, though many would argue that it is not
needed at the highest levels of "intelligence" or whatever the SATs measure.