Spooky stuff like this is usually bad grounding. The machines in question are connected to each other, right? (network? serial port? some such...) and the ground voltage is different,
causing current through the system when the others are up but its power is off.
I'd look into the docs on the UPS you have to see if there is a way to hook up a
ground lug on the *output* side of the UPS to tie it to building ground. I'd also
get one of those testers over at Home Depot to see if your outlets are all actually grounded.
I bet if you leave it plugged into the wall, and unplug the *other* connections
(network, video, etc.) for a few seconds, it will come up.
what the various parts of the computer are (monitor, case, media drives, power cables, network cables, etc.)
identify common cables by the plugs
identify media that can go in different drives
what happens when things are done wrong (i.e. plug phone line into ethernet jack -- telephone rings -> smoked ethernet port; loose video connection -> screen is "all red")
Fundamentals that will probably never change:
Computers need power -- no power => no computer usage
Computers don't eat: coffee, peanut butter & jelly, Coca Cola -- all BAD for computers.
Computers generate heat -- blocked fans => dead computer
Magnettic/optical storage -- how to make floppies, CD's unreadable... and don't do that!
Software does what the programmer said to do, not neccesarily what you want it to do
Sometimes you have to "trick" the computer into doing what you want -- the printouts come out off center, so tell it to make a bigger top margin than bottom to have it come out right...
How to describe what's going on to a helpdesk/support hotline
give "concrete" 20-questions type descriptions (sounds like.., looks like..., etc.)
screen dump images are good, or draw what's on the screen for reference (FAX?)
Intro to internet, http
DNS name lookups
conecting to site
requesting service
receiving data
what it looks like when things go wrong at each stage... i.e. DNS doesn't say "permission denied"...
Well, hack up the sources for your local copy of Nethack to make it much much harder.
When you can't win, the games get much less fun.
For example, find that flag that gets set if you eat your pet and turn it on at the beginning of the game. Turn up the odds on spontaneous monster creation, etc. Take scrolls of Remove Curse out of the game and crank up the odds on a water demon being created if you dip things in fountains...
She'll think she's lost her touch, and get disgusted, and quit. Of course, she may also smash your computer into little, eensy, weensy, tiny pieces first...
The story goes that it was at the end of one of the numberous big exams (i.e Freshman Engineering Physics) at the Purdue Hall of Music, wth something like 2k people taking an exam at once. The professor at the front of the room calls out that it's time to put the pencils
down and start turning in the papers, which everyone dutifully does, except for one guy in the 5th row, who is still scribbling away furiously. Exams are collected, students begin to leave the auditorium. The guy who kept on writing finally gets up, and walks up to the TA who is standing by the big stack of exams. The TA says "Forget it fella, we won't take it anymore." The student says "Do you have any idea who I am?" The TA replies "Well, no, there are 2000 people in this class..." The student says "So you have NO IDEA who I am.", and the TA says "Yep." So the student picks up part of the stack of exams, drops his in, and puts
the stack back down. "Good luck figuring out which one's mine then!" he says, and leaves.
...an LCD panel where your license plate should be, showing the license plate number of a different Member of Parliment or Government official every 15 minutes...
"And leaving the scene of the bank roberry was a car apparently belonging to
Margaret Thatcher. Film at 11..."
The other big problem is perennial budget uncertainty -- National Labs never know from one year to the next what their budget might be, as it literally takes an Act of Congress to renew the funding each and every year, and especially the last few years, it's rarely been anywhere near on time. Add to that the fact that sometimes the DOE takes budget back partway through the year...
It means that things you should buy, but that aren't absolutely critical, often get delayed until the Mad September Purchasing Rush, when folks actually
know what's left in their budget. This can mean that new database server to let you build the tracking system for something you really ought to have been tracking already is delayed 6 months to a year... Or you don't get training you should, or hire staff you should, not because there isn't budget for it, but because you don't know if there is budget for it.
Just repeat that sort of cycle for 10 years or so, and things can get kind of out of hand.
The judge ruled in large part on what he believed the intent of the people
to be who put the (un)Intelligent Design theory forward. The judge believed that
their intent was to promote religion in the public schools. I agree with him.
The Chicago Transit authority has had an
online trip planner
for quite some time that does this.
Although I suppose having one common one that could get you from
someplace in Chicago to someplace in New York would be pretty cool.
You can't deny that they are real issues with real impact on the American people.
<rant-mode>
Actually, I can, and do say so. They don't even make my top 10, except peripherally the Hummer H2 bit.
Abortions used to be illegal, and we had lots of abortions; the debate is whether to make it illegal, which does very little of any actual consequence, except decrease the quality of medical care overall.
Prayer in schools? Another non-issue. It turns into government sanctioned religion eventually, and gets kicked out as unconstitutional. It's against my religion to take the Pledge of Allegiance, but they do that in most schools in the country; I learned early on you can say "WHY pledge allegiance..." and nobody can tell the difference.
Intelligent Design/Evolution -- Nobody who's ever done the Creationism/Intelligent design thing in office in the last 2 decades has ever stayed in office long enough to make it happen. Non-issue.
Taxing the rich? The rich have never payed taxes noticably. Non-issue.
Drilling in the ANWR -- A damned shame, but barely a scratch in the surface of our overall environmental/climate quagmire, and a complete diversion from the real related issues (e.g. stopping the use of petroleum for fuel, etc.)
Balanced Budget/Deficit Spending -- these are just more and less direct methods of taxation.
One you don't mention -- Fighting Terrorism -- Deaths due to terrorism are nothing compared to deaths due to disease, natural disaster, and famine soon to come from climate change. Heck, the Tobacco companies kill way more people in a week than terrorists kill in a year. (well, roughly that proportion, I haven't looked up the exact numbers lately.)
Most of these issues are in fact short-term smoke-screens, designed to get you emotionally riled up; but when you look at things like what actually kills innocent people in large numbers, (even if you count embryos as innocent people, depending on your religious leanings) these issues don't even make any kind of a prioritized list.
Instead, we should be
massively improving education (class sizes in the 5-10 kids/teacher range), so that we have more graduates capable of contributing to the
remaining items.
(Here in the USA, anyhow) ramping up the CDC, FEMA, and other organizations that directly save lives, rather than cutting their budgets and responsibilities.
Similarly putting way more money into similar United Nations organizations.
Figuring out how to run our economy without fossil fuels, and how to
get the C02 levels in the atmosphere back down.
completly redesigning transportation to be orders of magnitude safer and not use non-renewable fuels.
take our most efficient helthcare system (Medicare, not any private insurance company) and take the age limit out of it, and give it to everyone. Let the insurance companies make money on fires, or go out of business on hurricanes (as global warming combined with long term trends scrubs our southern coasts clean of civilization...)
</rant-mode>
So anyway, I do think both major parties (and most of the small ones, too) have entirely the wrong priorities. The Green party has the closest to the right direction, but even there only in the broadest of terms, and they've demonstrated no facility with winning elections.
Do what real audio engineers do, run balanced signal lines. You can buy really good, pre-packaged "balun" transformers for $30 bucks/line or so, or you can by cheap isolation transformers and adaptors at RadioShack or such like, and build your own for cheap. With
something like this; You should be able to run balanced audio for both the
left and right channels on a cat-5 line, and build some boxes with cat-5
jacks, a cheap isolation transformers, and a stereo audio jack, and daisy chain as many speaker boxes together as you'd like. Hook the driver box to your computer, and hook an amplified speaker to each other one.
Actually, you can put up a filter with the OpenOffice tools to convert OpenDoc to Word format on the fly. So there's no "labor" at all, once you set it up, there's just a "download in Word format" button on the state's websites, or whatever.
That seems to me one of the things folks are overlooking here; the documents are being stored in OpenDoc format. They can be converted to at least 2 dozen other formats, automatically, for folks that want to read/use them in that format. That's the whole point -- it's a format which can be converted to current (and old) word processer formats, and will continue to be able to be converted to other formats as needed, since we have the source code that knows how to read the format to be able to build filters/converters, and will continue to be able to use that code, even if assorted companies go out of business, shift formats in a new release, whatever.
This choice of how documents are stored has absolutley no effect on who can read the document, because it can be converted to whatever format they need on the fly. But as usual, people knee-jerk react to the FUD being spread by Microsoft, without even thinking about it to see if it's really a problem.
The only way to do what you want is for the script in question to actually live on another box, and you provide a proxy that calls into the other box and runs the script remotely. (i.e. "rsh otherhost -l restricted-account/real/path/to command")
If they have root on that system, they can read anything on that system, and that's the end of it. You can hide it/obfuscate it N different ways, but they're all fixable -- in order to run it on that box, the perl text (or some equivalent transformation) has to be obtainable on that box for perl to execute it. And if it can be obtained to run it, it can be obtained to read it.
You might have enough limits with a BSD jail, or a virtual machine layer, to keep them in a subtree somewhere, but you're still going to have to call out of the jail/virtual machine to
let them run the script, so it's the same archetecture, just a different network.
I actually think from both perspectives a clean binary driver API could be a Good Thing, especially if it involved some sort of sandbox that such a driver would be kept in, and even more so if it could be a common binary API between, say, Linux, BSD, and possibly one or two other OSes.
You wouldn't have to rebuild/rerelease such a driver for each release of the kernel.
this would be really nice for distros, a kernel update wouldn't have to include
rebuilding the ABI-compliant drivers.
If your code is sensitive to optimization flags, etc. it can be compiled "properly"
once and not redone wrong by various distro builders. (yeah, yeah, it probably means
the code actually sucks, but...)
It would provide a clean boundary for the GPL-ness of the kernel; this gives you a way to
encircle vendors who think their code must be proprietary -- they keep a minimum amount
of proprietary code, and we encircle it with open, clean, GPL code. Then those vendors
can see how much business they get from Linux users, and start to take Linux users
concerns (like GPL-ing their drivers) more seriously.
You could build software adaptors that let you take drivers for other platforms
(MS Windows? OS/2? BSD?) and load them against a Linux kernel; and you could do it
once.
You could also build software adaptors that provide trace/debug/trace-playback
information for these ABI drivers, which could make it easier to debug problems.
Now of course, you could do the last two with the current, source-code driver interfaces;
but they would be (in my opinion) much harder to maintain without the sort of set-in-stone nature of an ABI driver interface.
I know some folks will argue for some sort of GPL purity -- that Linux should actively avoid any and all contact with proprietary code. But being able to run proprietary user-level code is actually a feature that lets you displace proprietary operating systems, and I think the same thing is true of drivers. And once the proprietary-driver vendors discover they can make money selling their hardware for Linux, they might discover that having their customers be able to send them bug fixes as well as bug reports is a Good Thing.
Well, I'm not a particle physicist, but where I work you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a few dozen of them, so here's my best misunderstanding of it:
Quantum physics models do state that various things happen in
discrete quanta -- i.e. you either transfer a photon, or you don't -- but that doesn't mean that there is only one such quantum level of change -- different frequencies of light are photons at different energy levels, etc.
(here's a calculator to find the energy of photons at a given frequency)
So when you hear someone talking about transferring half quantums of energy, they probably just have the frequency wrong... There are also, as I understand it, systems where
you can jump something up two energy levels with two photons,
and then emit one of a different frequency in one double-level jump (like those cards to help you see infrared led's at Radio shack, you charge them up with blue or green light, and then shine a remote control at them, and they glow visible red from the infrared pulse).
So it is possible there is a system where normally we double-jump energy levels in both directions, and there
is a halfway level you can get to with the right frequency of
photon; but that doesn't gut/break the model, it just means there's a very rare state that got left out of the model.
Of course, there should be a corresponding gap in the overall energy of the model if that were true, as I understand it, and I don't think CQM has such gaps left in it anymore; but
I suppose there could be a gap so small it's basically round-off at 6 or 7 signifigant figures. But it would be
correspondingly really really really rare, so being able to provoke such a state repeatedly within your lifetime (i.e. enough to generate actual usable power) should be
essentially impossible.
Actually, there are folks out there showing teachers how to
use computers in the classroom effectively; so one thing the teachers
could do is use the computers first, and take some
classes
to learn how to integrate the internet into their classes.
Or just use them to look things up in wikipedia, etc. since the third world classrooms don't have books either, and a couple of computers of this stripe are actually cheaper than
a decent school library full of books.
That if I use 4096-bit encryption, they'll argue they should be able to hold me for a year, and if I use 8192-bit encryption, for 2 years???
If you extrapolate it to "We get to hold people for as long as it takes to find whatever we're looking for on their hard drive", then they can argue for holding you for 200 years, depending how you might have hidden data on the hard drive.
b) actually, it was the trade in manufactured goods back to India which kept the shipping companies in business; especially once the opium trade from India to China dried up.
c) Well, they got the goods for basically the cost of shipping. When they couldn't fill the ships with things to sell back on the return trip, they cost twice as much. All of British Colonialism relied on some form of
bidirectional or triangle trade to make each leg of the shipping route profitable.
d) As I mentioned, the laws being resisted were unenforceable in any volume; thus the overflowing jails you mentioned.
You should note that just the salt tax was 5% of the tax income in India (see here
)
While it isn't where I first read about it (which was so many
years ago I'd be hard pressed to remember),
you might try reading
this summary of the writings of Arundhati Roy; in particular:
Roy has unkind words for people who treat nonviolence as political theater. They may indeed appeal to the conscience of the oppressors and seek to win hearts by self-suffering; they may get attention and dramatize their views; they may go to jail or on hunger strikes. But they do not make salt. It may be, of course, that the same people who are doing "picture demonstrations" in the morning to get anti-war images onto television screens, are busy in the afternoon running a food not bombs kitchen or a collective repair shop for recycled bicycles, in other words, making salt.
The second example Roy gives to show Gandhi's realism is the khadi based alternative economy, to which Gandhi gave most of twenty-five years of his life, when he was not in jail. Gandhi believed that the main motive that brought the British to India was to make money. He reasoned that on the day when they find that they can no longer make money, but could only lose money, they would leave. If Indians would practice, swadeshi, buying their own products, the British would lose their markets, and thus lose the main point of their presence on somebody else's subcontinent.
Roy implies that Gandhi wannabes who identify nonviolence with passive resistance have misunderstood him. They should learn from the master and get real. As Richard Deats has pointed out Gandhi never intended any separation of nonviolence from constructive program. *Nonviolence was constructive program. Constructive program was nonviolence. Gandhi always regarded the slow violence of economic injustice as equivalent to the fast violence of war. Nonviolence was their common antidote. The principles Gandhi believed would lead to economic justice - village self-sufficiency, non-possession, voluntary poverty, trusteeship... etc.-- were for him every bit as essential to a nonviolent way of life as submitting to the lati (steel-tipped baton) blows of the police without striking back.
The people making the money are the companies like Halliburton, Bechtel, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, etc.
-- the "Military Industrial Complex" that Pres. Truman warned about.
Who gives them the money is Congress.
The only way I see to stop them getting the money is for Congress-critters to be publicly embarassed for giving them the money (i.e. as opposed to equiping the soldiers that we're sending out without body armor or suitably armored vehicles) to the point they start losing elections. For that you need an Anti-Rove -- someone who understands political science well enough to help the average middle-of-the-road American see the big military industrial companies, and their lobbying power over Concress, as an actively bad thing that they need to fix.
That certainly isn't me -- I find public reaction to these things completely mystifying.
As most people do, you completely misunderstand how Ghandi accomplished what he did.
He got the British to leave economically. The people who got beaten and shot were the result of the British trying to enforce laws that they were passively resisting (i.e. making their own sea salt == not paying British salt taxes). Ghandi got people to stop doing the things that made the British money (paying assorted taxes, buying cloth made in British factories, etc.) to the point where it just wasn't worth it for the British to maintain their presence. And sure, some people got beaten and killed, but it was a lot fewer than would have died in a violent uprising, and a lot more effective, because it removed the politcal and economic pressure that kept the British in India.
People who think marches and protests are how nonviolence worked in India are just confused. They were simply the method to publicize the actions that made it work,
and to demonstrate that the laws in question were essentially unenforcable, when violated in large groups.
People suffering from that same confusion are having war protests and anti-globalization protests here in the U.S. that are completely ineffective, because all they do is march up and down and say "we don't like this".
One assumes someone reading this forum already has a computer, and possibly several. You don't need another one, just some sort of snooze/alarm cancel button for the one you have.
Granted, not everyone here is a programmer. But it might be the inspiration for someone to learn; just as wanting a ring you can't find in the store might be the impetus to take some classes on jewelry making.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd look into the docs on the UPS you have to see if there is a way to hook up a ground lug on the *output* side of the UPS to tie it to building ground. I'd also get one of those testers over at Home Depot to see if your outlets are all actually grounded.
I bet if you leave it plugged into the wall, and unplug the *other* connections (network, video, etc.) for a few seconds, it will come up.
For example, find that flag that gets set if you eat your pet and turn it on at the beginning of the game. Turn up the odds on spontaneous monster creation, etc. Take scrolls of Remove Curse out of the game and crank up the odds on a water demon being created if you dip things in fountains...
She'll think she's lost her touch, and get disgusted, and quit. Of course, she may also smash your computer into little, eensy, weensy, tiny pieces first...
Please do submit it! Even don't package it much...
It could have happened...
"And leaving the scene of the bank roberry was a car apparently belonging to Margaret Thatcher. Film at 11..."
It means that things you should buy, but that aren't absolutely critical, often get delayed until the Mad September Purchasing Rush, when folks actually know what's left in their budget. This can mean that new database server to let you build the tracking system for something you really ought to have been tracking already is delayed 6 months to a year... Or you don't get training you should, or hire staff you should, not because there isn't budget for it, but because you don't know if there is budget for it.
Just repeat that sort of cycle for 10 years or so, and things can get kind of out of hand.
The judge ruled in large part on what he believed the intent of the people to be who put the (un)Intelligent Design theory forward. The judge believed that their intent was to promote religion in the public schools. I agree with him.
Seems to me I've heard this idea before...
The Chicago Transit authority has had an online trip planner for quite some time that does this. Although I suppose having one common one that could get you from someplace in Chicago to someplace in New York would be pretty cool.
Actually, I can, and do say so. They don't even make my top 10, except peripherally the Hummer H2 bit.
- Abortions used to be illegal, and we had lots of abortions; the debate is whether to make it illegal, which does very little of any actual consequence, except decrease the quality of medical care overall.
- Prayer in schools? Another non-issue. It turns into government sanctioned religion eventually, and gets kicked out as unconstitutional. It's against my religion to take the Pledge of Allegiance, but they do that in most schools in the country; I learned early on you can say "WHY pledge allegiance..." and nobody can tell the difference.
- Intelligent Design/Evolution -- Nobody who's ever done the Creationism/Intelligent design thing in office in the last 2 decades has ever stayed in office long enough to make it happen. Non-issue.
- Taxing the rich? The rich have never payed taxes noticably. Non-issue.
- Drilling in the ANWR -- A damned shame, but barely a scratch in the surface of our overall environmental/climate quagmire, and a complete diversion from the real related issues (e.g. stopping the use of petroleum for fuel, etc.)
- Balanced Budget/Deficit Spending -- these are just more and less direct methods of taxation.
- One you don't mention -- Fighting Terrorism -- Deaths due to terrorism are nothing compared to deaths due to disease, natural disaster, and famine soon to come from climate change. Heck, the Tobacco companies kill way more people in a week than terrorists kill in a year. (well, roughly that proportion, I haven't looked up the exact numbers lately.)
Most of these issues are in fact short-term smoke-screens, designed to get you emotionally riled up; but when you look at things like what actually kills innocent people in large numbers, (even if you count embryos as innocent people, depending on your religious leanings) these issues don't even make any kind of a prioritized list.Instead, we should be
- massively improving education (class sizes in the 5-10 kids/teacher range), so that we have more graduates capable of contributing to the
remaining items.
- (Here in the USA, anyhow) ramping up the CDC, FEMA, and other organizations that directly save lives, rather than cutting their budgets and responsibilities.
- Similarly putting way more money into similar United Nations organizations.
- Figuring out how to run our economy without fossil fuels, and how to
get the C02 levels in the atmosphere back down.
- completly redesigning transportation to be orders of magnitude safer and not use non-renewable fuels.
- take our most efficient helthcare system (Medicare, not any private insurance company) and take the age limit out of it, and give it to everyone. Let the insurance companies make money on fires, or go out of business on hurricanes (as global warming combined with long term trends scrubs our southern coasts clean of civilization...)
</rant-mode>So anyway, I do think both major parties (and most of the small ones, too) have entirely the wrong priorities. The Green party has the closest to the right direction, but even there only in the broadest of terms, and they've demonstrated no facility with winning elections.
Do what real audio engineers do, run balanced signal lines. You can buy really good, pre-packaged "balun" transformers for $30 bucks/line or so, or you can by cheap isolation transformers and adaptors at RadioShack or such like, and build your own for cheap. With something like this; You should be able to run balanced audio for both the left and right channels on a cat-5 line, and build some boxes with cat-5 jacks, a cheap isolation transformers, and a stereo audio jack, and daisy chain as many speaker boxes together as you'd like. Hook the driver box to your computer, and hook an amplified speaker to each other one.
That seems to me one of the things folks are overlooking here; the documents are being stored in OpenDoc format. They can be converted to at least 2 dozen other formats, automatically, for folks that want to read/use them in that format. That's the whole point -- it's a format which can be converted to current (and old) word processer formats, and will continue to be able to be converted to other formats as needed, since we have the source code that knows how to read the format to be able to build filters/converters, and will continue to be able to use that code, even if assorted companies go out of business, shift formats in a new release, whatever.
This choice of how documents are stored has absolutley no effect on who can read the document, because it can be converted to whatever format they need on the fly. But as usual, people knee-jerk react to the FUD being spread by Microsoft, without even thinking about it to see if it's really a problem.
If they have root on that system, they can read anything on that system, and that's the end of it. You can hide it/obfuscate it N different ways, but they're all fixable -- in order to run it on that box, the perl text (or some equivalent transformation) has to be obtainable on that box for perl to execute it. And if it can be obtained to run it, it can be obtained to read it.
You might have enough limits with a BSD jail, or a virtual machine layer, to keep them in a subtree somewhere, but you're still going to have to call out of the jail/virtual machine to let them run the script, so it's the same archetecture, just a different network.
I actually think from both perspectives a clean binary driver API could be a Good Thing, especially if it involved some sort of sandbox that such a driver would be kept in, and even more so if it could be a common binary API between, say, Linux, BSD, and possibly one or two other OSes.
- You wouldn't have to rebuild/rerelease such a driver for each release of the kernel.
this would be really nice for distros, a kernel update wouldn't have to include
rebuilding the ABI-compliant drivers.
- If your code is sensitive to optimization flags, etc. it can be compiled "properly"
once and not redone wrong by various distro builders. (yeah, yeah, it probably means
the code actually sucks, but...)
- It would provide a clean boundary for the GPL-ness of the kernel; this gives you a way to
encircle vendors who think their code must be proprietary -- they keep a minimum amount
of proprietary code, and we encircle it with open, clean, GPL code. Then those vendors
can see how much business they get from Linux users, and start to take Linux users
concerns (like GPL-ing their drivers) more seriously.
- You could build software adaptors that let you take drivers for other platforms
(MS Windows? OS/2? BSD?) and load them against a Linux kernel; and you could do it
once.
- You could also build software adaptors that provide trace/debug/trace-playback
information for these ABI drivers, which could make it easier to debug problems.
Now of course, you could do the last two with the current, source-code driver interfaces; but they would be (in my opinion) much harder to maintain without the sort of set-in-stone nature of an ABI driver interface.I know some folks will argue for some sort of GPL purity -- that Linux should actively avoid any and all contact with proprietary code. But being able to run proprietary user-level code is actually a feature that lets you displace proprietary operating systems, and I think the same thing is true of drivers. And once the proprietary-driver vendors discover they can make money selling their hardware for Linux, they might discover that having their customers be able to send them bug fixes as well as bug reports is a Good Thing.
Quantum physics models do state that various things happen in discrete quanta -- i.e. you either transfer a photon, or you don't -- but that doesn't mean that there is only one such quantum level of change -- different frequencies of light are photons at different energy levels, etc. (here's a calculator to find the energy of photons at a given frequency)
So when you hear someone talking about transferring half quantums of energy, they probably just have the frequency wrong... There are also, as I understand it, systems where you can jump something up two energy levels with two photons, and then emit one of a different frequency in one double-level jump (like those cards to help you see infrared led's at Radio shack, you charge them up with blue or green light, and then shine a remote control at them, and they glow visible red from the infrared pulse).
So it is possible there is a system where normally we double-jump energy levels in both directions, and there is a halfway level you can get to with the right frequency of photon; but that doesn't gut/break the model, it just means there's a very rare state that got left out of the model. Of course, there should be a corresponding gap in the overall energy of the model if that were true, as I understand it, and I don't think CQM has such gaps left in it anymore; but I suppose there could be a gap so small it's basically round-off at 6 or 7 signifigant figures. But it would be correspondingly really really really rare, so being able to provoke such a state repeatedly within your lifetime (i.e. enough to generate actual usable power) should be essentially impossible.
Or just use them to look things up in wikipedia, etc. since the third world classrooms don't have books either, and a couple of computers of this stripe are actually cheaper than a decent school library full of books.
If you extrapolate it to "We get to hold people for as long as it takes to find whatever we're looking for on their hard drive", then they can argue for holding you for 200 years, depending how you might have hidden data on the hard drive.
b) actually, it was the trade in manufactured goods back to India which kept the shipping companies in business; especially once the opium trade from India to China dried up.
c) Well, they got the goods for basically the cost of shipping. When they couldn't fill the ships with things to sell back on the return trip, they cost twice as much. All of British Colonialism relied on some form of bidirectional or triangle trade to make each leg of the shipping route profitable. d) As I mentioned, the laws being resisted were unenforceable in any volume; thus the overflowing jails you mentioned.
You should note that just the salt tax was 5% of the tax income in India (see here )
While it isn't where I first read about it (which was so many years ago I'd be hard pressed to remember), you might try reading this summary of the writings of Arundhati Roy; in particular:
... rather than the honeynet project who have better tools, and far more experience at this sort of thing?
The people making the money are the companies like Halliburton, Bechtel, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, etc. -- the "Military Industrial Complex" that Pres. Truman warned about.
Who gives them the money is Congress.
The only way I see to stop them getting the money is for Congress-critters to be publicly embarassed for giving them the money (i.e. as opposed to equiping the soldiers that we're sending out without body armor or suitably armored vehicles) to the point they start losing elections. For that you need an Anti-Rove -- someone who understands political science well enough to help the average middle-of-the-road American see the big military industrial companies, and their lobbying power over Concress, as an actively bad thing that they need to fix.
That certainly isn't me -- I find public reaction to these things completely mystifying.
People who think marches and protests are how nonviolence worked in India are just confused. They were simply the method to publicize the actions that made it work, and to demonstrate that the laws in question were essentially unenforcable, when violated in large groups.
People suffering from that same confusion are having war protests and anti-globalization protests here in the U.S. that are completely ineffective, because all they do is march up and down and say "we don't like this".
Just make sure to keep it far enough away from the computers
It looks like the latest firmware for the iRiver imp550 cd players does ogg vorbis audio; but I'm not sure how "car-stereo" it is...
Granted, not everyone here is a programmer. But it might be the inspiration for someone to learn; just as wanting a ring you can't find in the store might be the impetus to take some classes on jewelry making.