How is israel an apartheid state? Is it not the same middle eastern people that every other country surrounding them is?
Yes, it is the same. Israel can't help becoming like it's neighbors. Syria isn't looking like a great place to ask for freedom right now. With a blockade of Gaza and over 40 years of occupation of the West bank, Israel is responsible for brutal oppression of over three million people. Is this worse than Israel's neighbors? Maybe not, but that doesn't make it right. One major difference - Israel is a democracy, and their people can vote for leaders who will end the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza blockade. In Syria, I only blame the rulers. I've been to Israel and very much like the people there, but they have a strange blindness that keeps them from seeing that what they are doing is wrong. That blindness exists here in the US as well. I debated just last night with a Jewish friend over the occupation of the west bank. It is so strange to have intelligent freedom-loving friends who support unending military occupation.
So, skip class, download SVN source code, along with Mercurial, git, and bzr. Compare not just the functionality, speed, portability, and ease of use, but look at the code. Compare the styles, and figure out what kind of code you want to write. Granted, profs usually do know more about their field, but the future will be built by hackers too bored to do the assigned homework.
What kills me is that to make a comment like that puts you in the group of people too smart to need developer training. When was the last time you didn't know more about new trends than your prof? Do slash-dotters really whine about night/weekend education budgets? Would we learn more in some community college class, or designing the world's next generation AI?
However, the reverse of your theory is probably close to true. We use uranium rather than thorium reactors because the military had experience with uranium. We spent trillions of dollars on nuclear weapons. There was never anything close to that kind of funding for thorium nuclear development.
Keeping plutonium-laced spent fuel in swimming pools all over the country is dumb-as-fuck
I think this point is probably one that almost all slashdotters can agree to. I just hate how our government is incapable of coming up with any improvement at all.
The reason we stopped building nuclear plants is that it's too expensive. It had very little to do with safety concerns. With massive government subsidies, and with no liability for accidents or waste management, power companies could justify nuclear. Without it, in the US, nuclear just can't compete with coal.
We need power, and research has shown that the US public is very interested in safe, renewable energy, as long as it's nearly as cheap as burning coal. Short of that, we'll burn all the coal, all of Canada's oil sands, and all the oil shale first, and convince ourselves that we're not impacting the environment. If nuclear technologies ever become economical, we'll have them everywhere, regardless of safety issues. We'll do a lot of solar in the desert states, because it's getting to be cheaper than the alternatives, but everywhere else, we'll stick with fossil fuels until they're gone.
Here's something I don't get. Why do Republicans hate plug-in hybrids? I guess that means less profit for Exxon, and that's got to piss them off, but it also means we burn more coal, which they like, right? We're currently building 150 new coal plants in the US. Is there any good reason to expand nuclear when we've got so much coal that the public wants to burn?
And people on slashdot.org read that Japan has already released 10% as much radioactive material as Chernobyl, and somehow it's all a liberal scare. BP has the worst oil spill in US history, yet somehow this is a non-issue for the environment. And somehow, this is all related to tax breaks for the rich, and building up our military. Group think in full swing.
The lead cooled reactors used in some Soviet submarines looks like it could be a good way to go. They are working on various commercial versions of this design now. I think we should build some pilot reactors to investigate these new plant designs, while trying to deal with the waste storage issue rather than keeping spent fuel at the power plants. In the meantime, I think we should review safety at our existing plants, to be sure they can be safely shut down after events like what happened in Japan. I think we should put new plant construction on hold until the safety review is complete, so we can apply lessons learned from Japan's experience to our new plants. However, I would hope the safety review could be completed quickly, say 12 months or so.
And don't forget pebble bed reactors, which are helium cooled, and which don't melt down when all power is lost. However, all these alternatives have so far proven too costly and/or to dangerous. Molten salt reactors and metal cooled fast reactors have caught fire in the past, and none has ever succeeded in operating through it's design lifetime. Newer versions of the traditional US reactor is able to self-cool for a long period of time through convection if all power is lost. It looks a lot better than our current systems.
I'm more concerned about the storage problem. The one thing I learned from the accident in Japan is that our storage pools require active cooling. Without it, they can boil away all the water, catch fire, and spew radiation into the air. We really need that Yucca Mountain waste storage solution. Having a hundred pools around the nation run by companies that will not be held accountable for any nuclear accident is incredibly stupid.
In the meantime, I think we should fund more test reactors of the varieties you mentioned, to see if we can come up with a safer, cheaper solution.
It is politics which is sleazy and slimy and harmful for those of us just trying to live.
Especially now days, it has become nearly impossible for government to help solve the many difficult social issues in America. No matter which side tries to take a step forward, the other side will tear it down. I'm hopeful that the recent trend towards social entrepreneurship will help us move forward.
The university's disability office did not know of a solution. If anybody knows of a solution, please let me know.
I have had to convert books manually to ebooks, but it is a lot of work. If you find a Kinkos (or whatever they're called now days), they will cut the binding off the book for under $2. If you have a scanner, preferably one with a feeder, you can scan them to RTF files (formatted text) pretty quick. I find the FineReader program for Mac a good deal ($100), though I was not able to buy it due to problems with their web site. For Windows, the "pro" version is $400 but wont do any better job. It just gives you lots of options. In e-book form, you can use your favorite e-reader with text-to-speech. Most of my blind friends use the JAWs screen reader and the Eloquence voice to read ebooks. With a magnifier to view pictures in the book, and a decent text-to-speech e-reader, you should be able to follow the book just fine. I use Linux (the Vinux flavor) rather than Windows, and the tools there are a bit harder to use, but they work well enough for me.
I would, but my vision impairment is mild. I have all my peripheral vision, but am losing central vision, similar to macular degeneration. With peripheral vision, and if I'm willing to install various alternative accessible apps on Android, I can get along just fine. Sometimes I just use high power reading glasses to see the screen, and it's fine. While I am very glad that Apple has decided to make all their products accessible, as Google should, Apple products come with too many strings attached for my taste.
I mostly agree with you. Educating coders helps, but most coders will move onto their next project before adding finishing touches that only a few of their users require, like being accessible to screen readers. However, in the US, we do have laws about how the government spends tax money, and people who take it have to take it with strings attached, including helping people with disabilities. Public universities are required to provide aid, which is why they can be sued when they fail. I don't like all of the lawsuits I've heard of the NFB filing, but I like this one. Google tools across the board are not very accessible, something they could fix for probably about a million dollars per year. Google should be ashamed of their record so far.
However, making Google fix their code wont solve the larger problem that many programs have very poor accessibility. I believe that people with vision or typing impairments should work together to make open source solutions that are better than anything we have today. This is happening to some extent, but with 150 million blind people across the planet, mostly unemployed, there should be enough willing volunteers to make this happen.
I have a bit of a vision impairment, and I can tell you, it's hard for even partially sighted people to use Google tools. It pisses me off every time there's non-speaking text, and what the heck is up with gmail? Android still has major problems, too, with the web browser and e-mail not talking. It's not illegal to make tools that don't work well with screen readers, but no public institution should require people to use these tools.
No, they haven't been tried for e-mail, and they would work if put into common use.
If we were willing to upgrade e-mail protocols, we could beat spam. How dumb is it that we allow any person in the world to trivially claim to be any other person when sending you an e-mail? Imagine what a pain it would be if Google and Facebook leak e-mails of all their users and their contact lists? Heck, we don't even have the will shift to secure DNS. Like the shift to IPv6, the world wont willing move forward unless forced. Instead of even switching to a system as simple as signing e-mail, we've got Bayesian filters and gray-listing at servers. The reason I use gmail (which doesn't support signing), is their spam filtering and gray-listing is the best I've found, which is probably only true because they have more money to throw at the problem.
Add signing, and a way to demand a refundable electronic cash deposit to be considered for white-listing, and problem solved.
Well, I can think of various technical solutions. For one, you only know the person on the other end based on their gpg public key, which is probably registered somewhere you reasonably trust if you want to accept the call. We could show you the registration info for the caller, and after answering you will find if the person on the other end claims to be the same person or organization. If the call turns out to be illegal spam (based on the national do-not-call list?), we could have buttons in the app to report the caller to both the registry where they published there public gpg key, and with federal authorities who may be able to look into major offenders.
Another part of the solution could be the whole web of trust thing, which is a great idea that never seemed to pan out. In theory, if you are trying to call me, some non-spammer I know should be able to vouch for you. Somewhere out there should be someone willing to identifying all real people on the net. In fact, maybe I would pay this organization a few bucks to somewhat verify that I'm a real person, and not a robot, someone unlikely to spread spam. If we automated black-listing spammers so fast that they didn't get to make many calls with that few bucks they paid to get white-listed, it wouldn't be profitable for them.
Another possibility is that for callers not on my white list, I demand some electronic cash for the call to go through, maybe something like a buck. If I accept the call and don't black list you afterwards, your white listed and your cash is refunded. If I blacklist you, I keep the buck. I'd love to do that one to my ex-wife if she ever calls:-)
The OSS community has innovation upside down. We let upstream teams (In this case Gnome or Nokia) stand in the way of innovation as gate keepers. We need to switch to a model more similar to Android, where any innovator can share their work quickly, without having to jump through hoops and waiting years. A new package system in Ubuntu could take the innovations we see in the Android app store, and build on them. It could enable not just apps, but libraries to be shared, with apps running in app jails, and with the exact libraries they were compiled and tested against. We need to enable innovation from individual coders, by promoting their work immediately, and freeing them from the hassle of convincing large upstream teams to adopt their changes. That would enable us to say "There is an app for that" about Ubuntu. As it is, OSS land is mostly a bunch of coders practicing mental masturbation, because there is little chance for most coders to share their work widely as simple installable packages available in Software Center. Instead, we have to copy source files from sourceforge or github, and paste them into our projects, with no system to push improvements upstream.
Mark Shuttleworth is mad because upstream didn't simply include all is work quickly, and without having to fight for it. I guess he knows now what it is like for the vast majority of coders who just want an app in Ubuntu. Similarly, Google is mad at Linux because Linux removed Google's Android contributions.
There should never be a gate-keeper on innovation. The setup we have now in OSS land is unacceptable. And, it's fixable.
Very well said. However, it's not just rich vs poor countries. We have richer and poorer people in the US, too. Also, information that may be worth thousands to me might be worth only dollars to you. That's why I like the fixed monthly/yearly fee concept. For example, Canadians could agree to pay an average of $50 more per year in income tax in order to fund the government to purchase all-you-can-eat rights to digital music. That would both compensate musicians more than they get now, while delivering more value to music lovers who could go nuts with all the rock they want. Even better would be Ebooks.coop succeeding in signing up most music publishers and having a $50 plan anyone could join if they so choose. Of course, in reality, the Ebooks.coop thing probably will go nowhere.
The ideal case is when everyone can freely download any digital content that's legal access (and here I just mean no kiddy-porn). Also, content creators should be rewarded based on the value of their work to consumers. Free markets fail here because digital content has different values to different people, and people have different amounts they can afford to spend.
I'm working with a few people on Ebooks.coop, which will be a co-op owned by it's members, for distributing digital content. I want to have an all-you-can-eat plan, where you can access as much content in the plan as you like for some fixed monthly or yearly fee. In an ideal world, people would just pay the fixed fee, they way they do for so many other fixed-price services like Internet, phone service, and cable TV. Then, while content isn't technically free, there's no incremental cost, and the barrier to using the content goes away.
Getting back on topic... poor countries of course can't pay US prices for digital content. As a result, while governments might give lip service to copy protection, they actually encourage their people to pirate freely. This helps the country lift itself out of poverty, in various ways, but it also means that local content creators will be underpaid. As an economy grows a large middle class, it becomes important to be able to make money selling digital content to them. Otherwise, no software, music, or electronics companies will have a home market to help get started. That's when the government switches to enforcing copy rights. Remember in the 70's when Japan was simply illegally copying all our stuff? Anyway, saying content providers should not get paid for their work is somewhat unrealistic, though I agree all content should have no incremental cost to users. A fixed fee per month or year, possibly with lower pricing for the poor, seems like a decent way to go.
Being spiritual and religious, and a good Christian, does not require you to believe Creation and that evolution is wrong. Some of my best friends are deeply religious brilliant people who manage to view the Bible as the Word of God, but an imperfect retelling. Every person I have ever met who feels strongly that abortion should be illegal also believes there is a good chance that a soul is put in at the moment of conception. I have some friends who aren't sure that a soul appears at that moment, but even some doubt is enough for them to want to ban abortion. I find that a very reasonable point of view. On the other hand, I have yet to meet a person who is sure that there is no soul granted at conception who believes that early abortions should be illegal. Even I think every abortion is tragic and it becomes worse the longer the baby progresses. Third term abortions should be and are illegal, unless there is danger to the mother. I support that, as do most pro-choice people.
However, the dividing line seems to be very much a matter of whether there is a soul in a baby too small to have nerve tissue. This is a religious, not scientific debate. It's not about Creationism, but you wont find many Creationists who are pro-choice. You also wont find many atheists who are pro-life.
Nice friendly discussion so far, so I'll try to be civil. I think the most important issue here is separation of church and state. When religions get in bed with government, they typically become an arm of the government for oppressing the people. Just look at Iran, for example, or almost any government in history that had a state religion. This is why I find it so scary that the Republican Party has since Regan was president, actively reached out to Christian fundamentalists, who believe the Bible is literally true, and also that most science is junk. Combine that with traditional industrial, military, and wealthy Republican backers, mix and stir ideas around for a while, and you get some pretty strange things, a new "True Conservative". A True Conservative believes the Bible is literally true and that rich people should have lower taxes, while we cut social programs for the middle class. Evolution is wrong, the Earth is not warming, at least due to man. Abortion is murder, and gays are immoral deviants at best. Oil and natural gas should be drilled for right now, and all military funding and troop increases are good.
That's a very strange set of beliefs to hold all at once, and it has come to exist due to group-think. It's "I'll agree to believe your most important beliefs if you agree to believe mine." It's the super-set of ideas that are important to the different groups that make up today's Republican party. I wouldn't be that worried, except that separation of Church and State is under attack, with Republicans slowly turning into a new American Christian party. Many intelligent non-religious Republicans, while not being true conservatives, still adopt as many beliefs from the Christian right as possible. They may believe evolution, but can't get to global warming until the Earth gets a few more degrees hotter. They're happy to believe that scientists are mostly a bunch of liberal left-wing idiots who are more interested in government funding than advancing science.
Again, this is all because of the breaking down of the separation of church and state. I understand why people who think the Earth is only a few thousand years old don't believe we are making the Earth warmer, and that evolution is obviously wrong. I respect their right to those views, as religious freedom is more important than making everyone believe the facts we've discovered in a hundred different fields of science. Religion has had a beef with science for centuries, but as long as it says a private non-government matter, I haven't got a big problem with that. However, with the Christian Coalition and religious right being accepted as true conservative Republicans, there's a lot to worry about. We're heading towards having a Christian state religion, and it's all down hill from there.
That rant doesn't really deserve a response, but I'm sitting here with a glass of wine with some time to kill...
In theory, it should be easier to publish an app in Debian than Android, but this is not the case at all.
Why on earth should that be the case?
Because we're all sharing our code freely with each other, rather than keeping it secret like most Android developers. All of that sharing should make it easier to build and share apps, but we've bunged it up and made it super-hard.
Without a major upgrade to our packaging system, Dy
Behind whom? At what?
It's falling behind Android and iOS. Look, we probably both like the tech under the hood in Debian, but random users want apps that work for them. I've got shared grocery lists, shared to-do lists, a geo-caching app that rocks, and a hundred other apps I actually use all the time. My Nexus One is the best productivity tool I've experienced since the adm3a terminal. Try getting any apps like that into Debian. The future of personal computing will be devices using speech recognition, multi-touch, and docks for tablets. Debian is awesome in the server farm, but if you just want to write and share an app, frankly Debian sucks.
What you call suffocating innovation, I call code quality.
I guess in that case you wont be interested in any of those many thousands of low quality apps available on Android or iOS. I agree that it is amazing that you can simply dist-upgrade in Debian. It's very impressive. But... to get there, Debian has had to introduce multiple years of delay to get a non-super-hot package from Unstable to Stable. There are "sponsors" who are the gate keepers, rather than letting users create apps for other users freely. "There's an app for that", is not going to be said about Debian anytime soon.
Debian packages libraries as soon as there is a demand for them. No interest, nobody cares.
Bull. Debian allows packages to be included once a Debian sponsor is interested. It doesn't matter how many users want a package. For example, I've got a package of significant interest to blind Linux users, which is still waiting for a sponsor. It doesn't matter that there are 200-ish Vinux users who want it in there. What matters is that there aren't blind Debian sponsors. At Ubuntu, there's a guy with a vision impairment, probably similar to me, who uses Orac and some magnification. He cares about this stuff, and that's why Ubuntu is advancing faster in accessibility, even though Canonical doesn't do accessibility testing in their standard flow.
If you want to talk about red tape, let's talk some more about Debian.
I'm afraid I have to disagree with the replies above. While obviously not immune to security problems, Android sand-boxing seems like a good step, enough that keeping older binaries around makes sense, IMO. I can't believe anyone thinks is an RAM issue. I mean, my phone seems to handle it just fine. Also, we can still share identical binaries, so even popular libraries are only likely to be duplicated at most a few times on any system.
So, instead of having to live with the nightmare of all those developers out there who statically link, and all those other developers who change their ABI without bumping the.so name, and instead of testing for literally years before allowing a new app or library into Debian Stable, why not modernize the packaging system, and run apps sand-boxed? The strength of Debian's original packaging system is what made Debian great, in addition to it's community development. However, now days it's very hard to contribute to Debian, and the packaging system is 90's vintage, and out of date.
I contribute a lot to the Vinux distro, which is Linux for people with vision impairments, currently based on Ubuntu. One reason for branching off Ubuntu is it has more of the latest and greatest innovations, while Debian Stable is a couple years out of date. We try to just ship the packages we change, and have users download most binaries from Ubuntu. The result is that we're unable to modify core packages, like GTK+, without breaking everything, because the ABI versioning stuff just doesn't work. In reality, you have to recompile everything if GTK+ changes. Because of the fragile nature of Debian shared binaries, we avoid fixing low level things. I have GTK+ accessibility fixes that are being abandoned. It's just not possible in most cases for a single contributor to offer improvements to Debian in a meaningful way anymore. There's too much red tape.
So, if you just want a firewall or file server, go with Debian. If you want modern touch-interface tablet software, look elsewhere, because Debian will never make the transition. It's packaging system and it's friction to new software is dragging Debian into the dust-bin of history.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it is the same. Israel can't help becoming like it's neighbors. Syria isn't looking like a great place to ask for freedom right now. With a blockade of Gaza and over 40 years of occupation of the West bank, Israel is responsible for brutal oppression of over three million people. Is this worse than Israel's neighbors? Maybe not, but that doesn't make it right. One major difference - Israel is a democracy, and their people can vote for leaders who will end the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza blockade. In Syria, I only blame the rulers. I've been to Israel and very much like the people there, but they have a strange blindness that keeps them from seeing that what they are doing is wrong. That blindness exists here in the US as well. I debated just last night with a Jewish friend over the occupation of the west bank. It is so strange to have intelligent freedom-loving friends who support unending military occupation.
So, skip class, download SVN source code, along with Mercurial, git, and bzr. Compare not just the functionality, speed, portability, and ease of use, but look at the code. Compare the styles, and figure out what kind of code you want to write. Granted, profs usually do know more about their field, but the future will be built by hackers too bored to do the assigned homework.
What kills me is that to make a comment like that puts you in the group of people too smart to need developer training. When was the last time you didn't know more about new trends than your prof? Do slash-dotters really whine about night/weekend education budgets? Would we learn more in some community college class, or designing the world's next generation AI?
Nice conspiracy theory, but wrong. The US military makes 100% of it's nuclear bomb material at it's own plants. The military has little to no interest in the crap leftover from nuclear power plants. The problem is we have not yet figured out how to make safe, cheap, reliable Thorium reactors. Wikipedia has an excellent page on Thorium reactors.
However, the reverse of your theory is probably close to true. We use uranium rather than thorium reactors because the military had experience with uranium. We spent trillions of dollars on nuclear weapons. There was never anything close to that kind of funding for thorium nuclear development.
I think this point is probably one that almost all slashdotters can agree to. I just hate how our government is incapable of coming up with any improvement at all.
The reason we stopped building nuclear plants is that it's too expensive. It had very little to do with safety concerns. With massive government subsidies, and with no liability for accidents or waste management, power companies could justify nuclear. Without it, in the US, nuclear just can't compete with coal.
We need power, and research has shown that the US public is very interested in safe, renewable energy, as long as it's nearly as cheap as burning coal. Short of that, we'll burn all the coal, all of Canada's oil sands, and all the oil shale first, and convince ourselves that we're not impacting the environment. If nuclear technologies ever become economical, we'll have them everywhere, regardless of safety issues. We'll do a lot of solar in the desert states, because it's getting to be cheaper than the alternatives, but everywhere else, we'll stick with fossil fuels until they're gone.
Here's something I don't get. Why do Republicans hate plug-in hybrids? I guess that means less profit for Exxon, and that's got to piss them off, but it also means we burn more coal, which they like, right? We're currently building 150 new coal plants in the US. Is there any good reason to expand nuclear when we've got so much coal that the public wants to burn?
And people on slashdot.org read that Japan has already released 10% as much radioactive material as Chernobyl, and somehow it's all a liberal scare. BP has the worst oil spill in US history, yet somehow this is a non-issue for the environment. And somehow, this is all related to tax breaks for the rich, and building up our military. Group think in full swing.
The lead cooled reactors used in some Soviet submarines looks like it could be a good way to go. They are working on various commercial versions of this design now. I think we should build some pilot reactors to investigate these new plant designs, while trying to deal with the waste storage issue rather than keeping spent fuel at the power plants. In the meantime, I think we should review safety at our existing plants, to be sure they can be safely shut down after events like what happened in Japan. I think we should put new plant construction on hold until the safety review is complete, so we can apply lessons learned from Japan's experience to our new plants. However, I would hope the safety review could be completed quickly, say 12 months or so.
And don't forget pebble bed reactors, which are helium cooled, and which don't melt down when all power is lost. However, all these alternatives have so far proven too costly and/or to dangerous. Molten salt reactors and metal cooled fast reactors have caught fire in the past, and none has ever succeeded in operating through it's design lifetime. Newer versions of the traditional US reactor is able to self-cool for a long period of time through convection if all power is lost. It looks a lot better than our current systems.
I'm more concerned about the storage problem. The one thing I learned from the accident in Japan is that our storage pools require active cooling. Without it, they can boil away all the water, catch fire, and spew radiation into the air. We really need that Yucca Mountain waste storage solution. Having a hundred pools around the nation run by companies that will not be held accountable for any nuclear accident is incredibly stupid.
In the meantime, I think we should fund more test reactors of the varieties you mentioned, to see if we can come up with a safer, cheaper solution.
Especially now days, it has become nearly impossible for government to help solve the many difficult social issues in America. No matter which side tries to take a step forward, the other side will tear it down. I'm hopeful that the recent trend towards social entrepreneurship will help us move forward.
I have had to convert books manually to ebooks, but it is a lot of work. If you find a Kinkos (or whatever they're called now days), they will cut the binding off the book for under $2. If you have a scanner, preferably one with a feeder, you can scan them to RTF files (formatted text) pretty quick. I find the FineReader program for Mac a good deal ($100), though I was not able to buy it due to problems with their web site. For Windows, the "pro" version is $400 but wont do any better job. It just gives you lots of options. In e-book form, you can use your favorite e-reader with text-to-speech. Most of my blind friends use the JAWs screen reader and the Eloquence voice to read ebooks. With a magnifier to view pictures in the book, and a decent text-to-speech e-reader, you should be able to follow the book just fine. I use Linux (the Vinux flavor) rather than Windows, and the tools there are a bit harder to use, but they work well enough for me.
I would, but my vision impairment is mild. I have all my peripheral vision, but am losing central vision, similar to macular degeneration. With peripheral vision, and if I'm willing to install various alternative accessible apps on Android, I can get along just fine. Sometimes I just use high power reading glasses to see the screen, and it's fine. While I am very glad that Apple has decided to make all their products accessible, as Google should, Apple products come with too many strings attached for my taste.
I mostly agree with you. Educating coders helps, but most coders will move onto their next project before adding finishing touches that only a few of their users require, like being accessible to screen readers. However, in the US, we do have laws about how the government spends tax money, and people who take it have to take it with strings attached, including helping people with disabilities. Public universities are required to provide aid, which is why they can be sued when they fail. I don't like all of the lawsuits I've heard of the NFB filing, but I like this one. Google tools across the board are not very accessible, something they could fix for probably about a million dollars per year. Google should be ashamed of their record so far.
However, making Google fix their code wont solve the larger problem that many programs have very poor accessibility. I believe that people with vision or typing impairments should work together to make open source solutions that are better than anything we have today. This is happening to some extent, but with 150 million blind people across the planet, mostly unemployed, there should be enough willing volunteers to make this happen.
I have a bit of a vision impairment, and I can tell you, it's hard for even partially sighted people to use Google tools. It pisses me off every time there's non-speaking text, and what the heck is up with gmail? Android still has major problems, too, with the web browser and e-mail not talking. It's not illegal to make tools that don't work well with screen readers, but no public institution should require people to use these tools.
No, they haven't been tried for e-mail, and they would work if put into common use.
If we were willing to upgrade e-mail protocols, we could beat spam. How dumb is it that we allow any person in the world to trivially claim to be any other person when sending you an e-mail? Imagine what a pain it would be if Google and Facebook leak e-mails of all their users and their contact lists? Heck, we don't even have the will shift to secure DNS. Like the shift to IPv6, the world wont willing move forward unless forced. Instead of even switching to a system as simple as signing e-mail, we've got Bayesian filters and gray-listing at servers. The reason I use gmail (which doesn't support signing), is their spam filtering and gray-listing is the best I've found, which is probably only true because they have more money to throw at the problem.
Add signing, and a way to demand a refundable electronic cash deposit to be considered for white-listing, and problem solved.
Well, I can think of various technical solutions. For one, you only know the person on the other end based on their gpg public key, which is probably registered somewhere you reasonably trust if you want to accept the call. We could show you the registration info for the caller, and after answering you will find if the person on the other end claims to be the same person or organization. If the call turns out to be illegal spam (based on the national do-not-call list?), we could have buttons in the app to report the caller to both the registry where they published there public gpg key, and with federal authorities who may be able to look into major offenders.
Another part of the solution could be the whole web of trust thing, which is a great idea that never seemed to pan out. In theory, if you are trying to call me, some non-spammer I know should be able to vouch for you. Somewhere out there should be someone willing to identifying all real people on the net. In fact, maybe I would pay this organization a few bucks to somewhat verify that I'm a real person, and not a robot, someone unlikely to spread spam. If we automated black-listing spammers so fast that they didn't get to make many calls with that few bucks they paid to get white-listed, it wouldn't be profitable for them.
Another possibility is that for callers not on my white list, I demand some electronic cash for the call to go through, maybe something like a buck. If I accept the call and don't black list you afterwards, your white listed and your cash is refunded. If I blacklist you, I keep the buck. I'd love to do that one to my ex-wife if she ever calls :-)
The OSS community has innovation upside down. We let upstream teams (In this case Gnome or Nokia) stand in the way of innovation as gate keepers. We need to switch to a model more similar to Android, where any innovator can share their work quickly, without having to jump through hoops and waiting years. A new package system in Ubuntu could take the innovations we see in the Android app store, and build on them. It could enable not just apps, but libraries to be shared, with apps running in app jails, and with the exact libraries they were compiled and tested against. We need to enable innovation from individual coders, by promoting their work immediately, and freeing them from the hassle of convincing large upstream teams to adopt their changes. That would enable us to say "There is an app for that" about Ubuntu. As it is, OSS land is mostly a bunch of coders practicing mental masturbation, because there is little chance for most coders to share their work widely as simple installable packages available in Software Center. Instead, we have to copy source files from sourceforge or github, and paste them into our projects, with no system to push improvements upstream.
Mark Shuttleworth is mad because upstream didn't simply include all is work quickly, and without having to fight for it. I guess he knows now what it is like for the vast majority of coders who just want an app in Ubuntu. Similarly, Google is mad at Linux because Linux removed Google's Android contributions.
There should never be a gate-keeper on innovation. The setup we have now in OSS land is unacceptable. And, it's fixable.
Very well said. However, it's not just rich vs poor countries. We have richer and poorer people in the US, too. Also, information that may be worth thousands to me might be worth only dollars to you. That's why I like the fixed monthly/yearly fee concept. For example, Canadians could agree to pay an average of $50 more per year in income tax in order to fund the government to purchase all-you-can-eat rights to digital music. That would both compensate musicians more than they get now, while delivering more value to music lovers who could go nuts with all the rock they want. Even better would be Ebooks.coop succeeding in signing up most music publishers and having a $50 plan anyone could join if they so choose. Of course, in reality, the Ebooks.coop thing probably will go nowhere.
The ideal case is when everyone can freely download any digital content that's legal access (and here I just mean no kiddy-porn). Also, content creators should be rewarded based on the value of their work to consumers. Free markets fail here because digital content has different values to different people, and people have different amounts they can afford to spend.
I'm working with a few people on Ebooks.coop, which will be a co-op owned by it's members, for distributing digital content. I want to have an all-you-can-eat plan, where you can access as much content in the plan as you like for some fixed monthly or yearly fee. In an ideal world, people would just pay the fixed fee, they way they do for so many other fixed-price services like Internet, phone service, and cable TV. Then, while content isn't technically free, there's no incremental cost, and the barrier to using the content goes away.
Getting back on topic... poor countries of course can't pay US prices for digital content. As a result, while governments might give lip service to copy protection, they actually encourage their people to pirate freely. This helps the country lift itself out of poverty, in various ways, but it also means that local content creators will be underpaid. As an economy grows a large middle class, it becomes important to be able to make money selling digital content to them. Otherwise, no software, music, or electronics companies will have a home market to help get started. That's when the government switches to enforcing copy rights. Remember in the 70's when Japan was simply illegally copying all our stuff? Anyway, saying content providers should not get paid for their work is somewhat unrealistic, though I agree all content should have no incremental cost to users. A fixed fee per month or year, possibly with lower pricing for the poor, seems like a decent way to go.
Being spiritual and religious, and a good Christian, does not require you to believe Creation and that evolution is wrong. Some of my best friends are deeply religious brilliant people who manage to view the Bible as the Word of God, but an imperfect retelling. Every person I have ever met who feels strongly that abortion should be illegal also believes there is a good chance that a soul is put in at the moment of conception. I have some friends who aren't sure that a soul appears at that moment, but even some doubt is enough for them to want to ban abortion. I find that a very reasonable point of view. On the other hand, I have yet to meet a person who is sure that there is no soul granted at conception who believes that early abortions should be illegal. Even I think every abortion is tragic and it becomes worse the longer the baby progresses. Third term abortions should be and are illegal, unless there is danger to the mother. I support that, as do most pro-choice people.
However, the dividing line seems to be very much a matter of whether there is a soul in a baby too small to have nerve tissue. This is a religious, not scientific debate. It's not about Creationism, but you wont find many Creationists who are pro-choice. You also wont find many atheists who are pro-life.
Nice friendly discussion so far, so I'll try to be civil. I think the most important issue here is separation of church and state. When religions get in bed with government, they typically become an arm of the government for oppressing the people. Just look at Iran, for example, or almost any government in history that had a state religion. This is why I find it so scary that the Republican Party has since Regan was president, actively reached out to Christian fundamentalists, who believe the Bible is literally true, and also that most science is junk. Combine that with traditional industrial, military, and wealthy Republican backers, mix and stir ideas around for a while, and you get some pretty strange things, a new "True Conservative". A True Conservative believes the Bible is literally true and that rich people should have lower taxes, while we cut social programs for the middle class. Evolution is wrong, the Earth is not warming, at least due to man. Abortion is murder, and gays are immoral deviants at best. Oil and natural gas should be drilled for right now, and all military funding and troop increases are good.
That's a very strange set of beliefs to hold all at once, and it has come to exist due to group-think. It's "I'll agree to believe your most important beliefs if you agree to believe mine." It's the super-set of ideas that are important to the different groups that make up today's Republican party. I wouldn't be that worried, except that separation of Church and State is under attack, with Republicans slowly turning into a new American Christian party. Many intelligent non-religious Republicans, while not being true conservatives, still adopt as many beliefs from the Christian right as possible. They may believe evolution, but can't get to global warming until the Earth gets a few more degrees hotter. They're happy to believe that scientists are mostly a bunch of liberal left-wing idiots who are more interested in government funding than advancing science.
Again, this is all because of the breaking down of the separation of church and state. I understand why people who think the Earth is only a few thousand years old don't believe we are making the Earth warmer, and that evolution is obviously wrong. I respect their right to those views, as religious freedom is more important than making everyone believe the facts we've discovered in a hundred different fields of science. Religion has had a beef with science for centuries, but as long as it says a private non-government matter, I haven't got a big problem with that. However, with the Christian Coalition and religious right being accepted as true conservative Republicans, there's a lot to worry about. We're heading towards having a Christian state religion, and it's all down hill from there.
That rant doesn't really deserve a response, but I'm sitting here with a glass of wine with some time to kill...
Because we're all sharing our code freely with each other, rather than keeping it secret like most Android developers. All of that sharing should make it easier to build and share apps, but we've bunged it up and made it super-hard.
It's falling behind Android and iOS. Look, we probably both like the tech under the hood in Debian, but random users want apps that work for them. I've got shared grocery lists, shared to-do lists, a geo-caching app that rocks, and a hundred other apps I actually use all the time. My Nexus One is the best productivity tool I've experienced since the adm3a terminal. Try getting any apps like that into Debian. The future of personal computing will be devices using speech recognition, multi-touch, and docks for tablets. Debian is awesome in the server farm, but if you just want to write and share an app, frankly Debian sucks.
I guess in that case you wont be interested in any of those many thousands of low quality apps available on Android or iOS. I agree that it is amazing that you can simply dist-upgrade in Debian. It's very impressive. But... to get there, Debian has had to introduce multiple years of delay to get a non-super-hot package from Unstable to Stable. There are "sponsors" who are the gate keepers, rather than letting users create apps for other users freely. "There's an app for that", is not going to be said about Debian anytime soon.
Bull. Debian allows packages to be included once a Debian sponsor is interested. It doesn't matter how many users want a package. For example, I've got a package of significant interest to blind Linux users, which is still waiting for a sponsor. It doesn't matter that there are 200-ish Vinux users who want it in there. What matters is that there aren't blind Debian sponsors. At Ubuntu, there's a guy with a vision impairment, probably similar to me, who uses Orac and some magnification. He cares about this stuff, and that's why Ubuntu is advancing faster in accessibility, even though Canonical doesn't do accessibility testing in their standard flow.
If you want to talk about red tape, let's talk some more about Debian.
I'm afraid I have to disagree with the replies above. While obviously not immune to security problems, Android sand-boxing seems like a good step, enough that keeping older binaries around makes sense, IMO. I can't believe anyone thinks is an RAM issue. I mean, my phone seems to handle it just fine. Also, we can still share identical binaries, so even popular libraries are only likely to be duplicated at most a few times on any system.
So, instead of having to live with the nightmare of all those developers out there who statically link, and all those other developers who change their ABI without bumping the .so name, and instead of testing for literally years before allowing a new app or library into Debian Stable, why not modernize the packaging system, and run apps sand-boxed? The strength of Debian's original packaging system is what made Debian great, in addition to it's community development. However, now days it's very hard to contribute to Debian, and the packaging system is 90's vintage, and out of date.
I contribute a lot to the Vinux distro, which is Linux for people with vision impairments, currently based on Ubuntu. One reason for branching off Ubuntu is it has more of the latest and greatest innovations, while Debian Stable is a couple years out of date. We try to just ship the packages we change, and have users download most binaries from Ubuntu. The result is that we're unable to modify core packages, like GTK+, without breaking everything, because the ABI versioning stuff just doesn't work. In reality, you have to recompile everything if GTK+ changes. Because of the fragile nature of Debian shared binaries, we avoid fixing low level things. I have GTK+ accessibility fixes that are being abandoned. It's just not possible in most cases for a single contributor to offer improvements to Debian in a meaningful way anymore. There's too much red tape.
So, if you just want a firewall or file server, go with Debian. If you want modern touch-interface tablet software, look elsewhere, because Debian will never make the transition. It's packaging system and it's friction to new software is dragging Debian into the dust-bin of history.