It is interesting to observe, in the aviation world, the gulf between the FAA (law enforcement), NTSB (safety investigation/improvement), and civil law.
In a single accident, the NTSB may determine fault based on their investigation, the FAA my lay charges, and a civil suite may be filed for a court to award damages. Nothing says that they all have to be consistant.
When it comes to safety improvement, determination of causes and changes to make driving safer, I think I'd trust the NTSB.
We were camping in a game reserve in Kenya when I was in high school. An elephant came along in the middle of the night and decided to see if there was any food in our tent -- which we were in at the time.
As the elephant pulled the tent down, we escaped through a newly formed rip in the side away from the elephant to some friends tent not far away. We then watched the tent get turned inside out, and heard some nasty crunches and bangs as things were abused.
My short-wave radio was in the tent. One of the knobs had been pushed through the case and broken the corner off the circuit board. When soldered back together, it worked!
The only thing that suffered permanent damage was the tent. We never went camping in Kenya again.
If you live in toronto you will likely hear "about" said about 47 different ways -- but they will most likely be in different languages.
I just spent 3 weeks there and couldn't get over the ethnic diversity. I'm told about 40% of the population come from recognizable non-canadian ethnic groups.
And we had some pretty good Indian, Greek, and Chinese food while we were there.
I'm guessing here, as I've heard this to be the case from other south-pole posters.
Normal satellite internet would be obtained through geosynchronous satellites. Unfortunately, those are over the equator, which would be right on the horizon from the pole.
So my question is, do they connect by tracking lower orbit satellites, or is there some wobble in the satellite orbit that allows contact for part of the day?
I've run a redhat/dsl box in my basement for four years. Until 6 months ago I had real internet access. Then they blocked outgoing SMTP. I'm running several mailing lists -- High school alumni with about 60 or so people per list. One in particular can get quite active. I also send out newsletters regarding an upcoming event to 100 people or so.
Reworking exim to use the ISP's SMTP server wasn't a problem, until they actually started counting outgoing emails and disabled my account for a day due to >300 emails/hour.
I figured it was time to move from my "grey" basement server to a commercial host. I was amazed at the price for what I wanted -- $8/month or less! I signed up and had things working in a few hours.
It took a few days before problems really started to appear. Lots of people didn't appear to be getting email from the lists. More research showed that, in fact, although they advertised mailman lists, they still limited outgoing emails to ~60/hour or less.
Two months later, I'm still with them. Looking around I've found that just about everyone puts those same anti-spam limits on ougoing email. Not having limits labels a provider as being "spam friendly", and I am the one suffering. The best I could find without limits was $35/month, which is steeper than I would like.
Unfortunately, we often confuse physical laws and longstanding assumptions. Sometimes it is one of those over-the-shoulder questioners who can tell the difference.
This could well be snake-oil. Anyone recall the CB craze of the '70s and the antennas that were sold to the gullible?
Hams will certainly question, but if there is validity in the design, you can bet that it will be improved and made functional. The only despicable response is to say "It is impossible, and I don't want to hear another word about it!"
The aricle specifically states that it has high bandwidth.
It is nice to see people questioning basic assumptions. When I was in university, we were told that there was a hard limit on the amount of data that could be transferred over a standard phone line -- that was 1200 baud, hence 1200 bits/second.
Antenna design has had basic assumptions about it for years. It is only when you start to question those assumptions that you move forward.
I ran my domain on a linux box in my basement over a DSL line for about 4 years. 6 months ago my ISP started blocking outgoing port 25. My mailing lists were down for a couple days until I figured out how to reconfig Exim to use my ISPs SMTP server.
3 Months ago my connection died. I checked a bunch of things before I realized that the connection light on my modem was out -- definitly not on my end. I picked up the phone to call the help desk (1st time in 5 years) and found a message waiting that my account had been disabled due to me sending SPAM.
24 hours later when I actually got hold of the right person, I was in for a shock. He was nice, he was understanding, and the problem was fixed! When my account hit over 300 outgoing emails in an hour, they disabled it and called me. 5 emails to a 60 person list would cause the trigger -- not hard to imagine. He flagged the account to not trigger at that level.
Last month I moved the domain to a commercial host. There have been teething troubles there, but now I've signed up for google adsense and it appears that it will pay for the hosting plus the domain!
Michael
(And the teething trouble was that they advertised mailman mailing lists -- but their outgoing limit of 15 email/hour applied to those. Sigh. Took two weeks to fix, but they did it! Way to go dh2.)
SAP has about the worst User Interface I've ever seen. The only exception might be old IBM terminals running on mainframes.
For all the negative we say about microsoft, they have done a lot for generating a consistant user interface. On SAP, sometimes you have to hit enter, sometimes you click the green checkmark (in "random" locations), sometimes you click the clock icon, sometimes you hit f8.
Unless you use it every day, you forget how to use the basic functions.
You forget how nice it is to use Windows until you use SAP!
If the goal of life is to die with as many toys as possible, then marketing is a good thing.
If we look at the world around us and decide that we want to make a positive difference in the world, then marketing is an incredible distraction that can easily turn us into selfish people.
There is nothing that keeps people from doing good quite like the desire for "Things".
We bought our first computer in 1979 -- A TRS-80 model 1. After lots of consideration, we decided to spend the extra $150 to get the 16k version rather than the standard 4k memory.
So $150 for 12k of memory. Ouch!
And I still contend that a home computer costs $1000. The capabilities have gone up immensly, but a basic home computer costs about the same $ amount as it did 25 years ago.
>> $3000US/year buys good health insurance in the states.
As long as you aren't sick....
One of the reasons that our health care is expensive is that it extends to the poor, the elderly, and those with medical conditions that would preclude them from getting affordable insurance in the US.
You could say the same about anti-lock brakes. "What happens if the computer decides to release your brakes at the wrong time!!?".
The answer is that they asked that question early in design. It detects anomalies and shuts the system down. I expect it to be the same with "auto-steering".
You make a good point: Morality is relative to the culture in which you live.
And that is the reason that westerners can not impose solutions on the third world. The best that the west can do is to provide the tools for the third world to come up with their own solutions.
Internet connectivity is a tool. It does not come with moral baggage or western decision making. The users have to make their own choices. They can participate in a forum on agricultural practices, they can accept one-sided advice on just about anything, or they can look at porn.
And if parts of africa could develop more technical expertise and infrastructure, it would be another building block in the world economy.
My experience has been with Kenya. There are about 40 different tribal languages. Business is usually conducted in English or Swahili.
School children learn english and swahili at the same time, early in primary school.
Status seems to be a very important thing in Kenya. It is seen to be "better" if you have a western education, and speaking english is part of that, so english has become the language of much of the establishment. You speak english to look good, you speak swahili to your friends, and your tribal language (in private) only to your close family.
I wouldn't say that the tribal languages are dieing, but there is very little link between them and computers. I'm not convinced that that is a good thing.
Yes, but swahili is regular enough that the infixes can be readily isolated based on a few simple rules.
On the other hand, I really question the need for a swahili spell-checker at all. Pronunciation is so consistant that if you can say it, you can spell it.
Swahili has to one of the most exception-free languages in the world.
Almost all famine is caused by people. During civil wars (e.g. Sudan) any crops found are either confiscated or destroyed to prevent them from feeding the "enemy". Both sides do it.
Africa is just beginning to get connected to the world. While the cities have had communication for a while, the rural areas tend to be very isolated.
I think this is fertile breeding ground for open source. The problem is the microsoft is the only thing that seems to be known. With any computer training being "how to used windows" and pirated copies of windows readily available, it is hard to take a moral high ground, particularly in cultures where morality doesn't hold much sway -- read widespread corruption, AIDS.
Open source has a place, but only as part of a wider campain to get internet to rural areas.
And of course the question: Why do rural people need internet? I believe it is all about finding answers. If somebody wants to have a better life, they need access to information. Better farming techniques? Better building methods? How to avoid scams?
I'm going to Africa later this year for two years. I hope to play some small part in giving people a better life through access to information.
I don't care if Grandma runs Linux -- what I want is a straight-forward enough system that I can do what I want on it without being a guru.
We won't get that straight-forward system until we get enough support for other manufacturers to support it.
I'm running XP on my laptop. I tried running Fedora but quickly came to a dead halt. My 802.11b card was not decently supported. I hacked around with suggested work-arounds for a while, but gave up eventually. Wider use will result in better vendor support. Somewhere along the line program installation will have to get easier.
I want wider support of Linux to make it easier for me to use Linux, not grandma. 10% of desktop use would be fine -- enough to get support, but not so ubiquitous to get the bad press.
Check out your local Goodwill store
on
USB Swiss Army Knife
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
You want to buy your knife back? It might end up in the local goodwill store.
Take a look at These pics of items apparently confiscated in Sacramento.
Slashdot Mirror
It is interesting to observe, in the aviation world, the gulf between the FAA (law enforcement), NTSB (safety investigation/improvement), and civil law.
In a single accident, the NTSB may determine fault based on their investigation, the FAA my lay charges, and a civil suite may be filed for a court to award damages. Nothing says that they all have to be consistant.
When it comes to safety improvement, determination of causes and changes to make driving safer, I think I'd trust the NTSB.
We were camping in a game reserve in Kenya when I was in high school. An elephant came along in the middle of the night and decided to see if there was any food in our tent -- which we were in at the time.
As the elephant pulled the tent down, we escaped through a newly formed rip in the side away from the elephant to some friends tent not far away. We then watched the tent get turned inside out, and heard some nasty crunches and bangs as things were abused.
My short-wave radio was in the tent. One of the knobs had been pushed through the case and broken the corner off the circuit board. When soldered back together, it worked!
The only thing that suffered permanent damage was the tent. We never went camping in Kenya again.
If you live in toronto you will likely hear "about" said about 47 different ways -- but they will most likely be in different languages.
I just spent 3 weeks there and couldn't get over the ethnic diversity. I'm told about 40% of the population come from recognizable non-canadian ethnic groups.
And we had some pretty good Indian, Greek, and Chinese food while we were there.
I'm guessing here, as I've heard this to be the case from other south-pole posters.
Normal satellite internet would be obtained through geosynchronous satellites. Unfortunately, those are over the equator, which would be right on the horizon from the pole.
So my question is, do they connect by tracking lower orbit satellites, or is there some wobble in the satellite orbit that allows contact for part of the day?
Yep, it is getting more widespread too.
I've run a redhat/dsl box in my basement for four years. Until 6 months ago I had real internet access. Then they blocked outgoing SMTP. I'm running several mailing lists -- High school alumni with about 60 or so people per list. One in particular can get quite active. I also send out newsletters regarding an upcoming event to 100 people or so.
Reworking exim to use the ISP's SMTP server wasn't a problem, until they actually started counting outgoing emails and disabled my account for a day due to >300 emails/hour.
I figured it was time to move from my "grey" basement server to a commercial host. I was amazed at the price for what I wanted -- $8/month or less! I signed up and had things working in a few hours.
It took a few days before problems really started to appear. Lots of people didn't appear to be getting email from the lists. More research showed that, in fact, although they advertised mailman lists, they still limited outgoing emails to ~60/hour or less.
Two months later, I'm still with them. Looking around I've found that just about everyone puts those same anti-spam limits on ougoing email. Not having limits labels a provider as being "spam friendly", and I am the one suffering. The best I could find without limits was $35/month, which is steeper than I would like.
"We have met the enemy, and he is us!"
Michael
Is that what you call a Darwinian filter?
Unfortunately, we often confuse physical laws and longstanding assumptions. Sometimes it is one of those over-the-shoulder questioners who can tell the difference.
This could well be snake-oil. Anyone recall the CB craze of the '70s and the antennas that were sold to the gullible?
Hams will certainly question, but if there is validity in the design, you can bet that it will be improved and made functional. The only despicable response is to say "It is impossible, and I don't want to hear another word about it!"
The aricle specifically states that it has high bandwidth.
It is nice to see people questioning basic assumptions. When I was in university, we were told that there was a hard limit on the amount of data that could be transferred over a standard phone line -- that was 1200 baud, hence 1200 bits/second.
Antenna design has had basic assumptions about it for years. It is only when you start to question those assumptions that you move forward.
de VE9MKS
I ran my domain on a linux box in my basement over a DSL line for about 4 years. 6 months ago my ISP started blocking outgoing port 25. My mailing lists were down for a couple days until I figured out how to reconfig Exim to use my ISPs SMTP server.
3 Months ago my connection died. I checked a bunch of things before I realized that the connection light on my modem was out -- definitly not on my end. I picked up the phone to call the help desk (1st time in 5 years) and found a message waiting that my account had been disabled due to me sending SPAM.
24 hours later when I actually got hold of the right person, I was in for a shock. He was nice, he was understanding, and the problem was fixed! When my account hit over 300 outgoing emails in an hour, they disabled it and called me. 5 emails to a 60 person list would cause the trigger -- not hard to imagine. He flagged the account to not trigger at that level.
Last month I moved the domain to a commercial host. There have been teething troubles there, but now I've signed up for google adsense and it appears that it will pay for the hosting plus the domain!
Michael
(And the teething trouble was that they advertised mailman mailing lists -- but their outgoing limit of 15 email/hour applied to those. Sigh. Took two weeks to fix, but they did it! Way to go dh2.)
SAP has about the worst User Interface I've ever seen. The only exception might be old IBM terminals running on mainframes.
For all the negative we say about microsoft, they have done a lot for generating a consistant user interface. On SAP, sometimes you have to hit enter, sometimes you click the green checkmark (in "random" locations), sometimes you click the clock icon, sometimes you hit f8.
Unless you use it every day, you forget how to use the basic functions.
You forget how nice it is to use Windows until you use SAP!
And everyone with moderator points saw the opportunity for FP and lost their chance to mod up some outrageously great comments!
Now he ain't nothin but spam in a can. Or is it *the* can.
M
$quote =~ s/For those who didn't RTFA/For those who couldn't RTFA/
Thanks slashdot.
Lottery or Contest winnings are considered a windfall, and are not taxable. I believe it is the same with inheritance.
It is hard to believe that there are cases where our taxes are actually _Lower_ than in the US!
I'll pass up my moderator points on this one.
If the goal of life is to die with as many toys as possible, then marketing is a good thing.
If we look at the world around us and decide that we want to make a positive difference in the world, then marketing is an incredible distraction that can easily turn us into selfish people.
There is nothing that keeps people from doing good quite like the desire for "Things".
We bought our first computer in 1979 -- A TRS-80 model 1. After lots of consideration, we decided to spend the extra $150 to get the 16k version rather than the standard 4k memory.
So $150 for 12k of memory. Ouch!
And I still contend that a home computer costs $1000. The capabilities have gone up immensly, but a basic home computer costs about the same $ amount as it did 25 years ago.
As long as you aren't sick....
One of the reasons that our health care is expensive is that it extends to the poor, the elderly, and those with medical conditions that would preclude them from getting affordable insurance in the US.
You could say the same about anti-lock brakes. "What happens if the computer decides to release your brakes at the wrong time!!?".
The answer is that they asked that question early in design. It detects anomalies and shuts the system down. I expect it to be the same with "auto-steering".
You make a good point: Morality is relative to the culture in which you live.
And that is the reason that westerners can not impose solutions on the third world. The best that the west can do is to provide the tools for the third world to come up with their own solutions.
Internet connectivity is a tool. It does not come with moral baggage or western decision making. The users have to make their own choices. They can participate in a forum on agricultural practices, they can accept one-sided advice on just about anything, or they can look at porn.
And if parts of africa could develop more technical expertise and infrastructure, it would be another building block in the world economy.
My experience has been with Kenya. There are about 40 different tribal languages. Business is usually conducted in English or Swahili.
School children learn english and swahili at the same time, early in primary school.
Status seems to be a very important thing in Kenya. It is seen to be "better" if you have a western education, and speaking english is part of that, so english has become the language of much of the establishment. You speak english to look good, you speak swahili to your friends, and your tribal language (in private) only to your close family.
I wouldn't say that the tribal languages are dieing, but there is very little link between them and computers. I'm not convinced that that is a good thing.
Simple answer: You pocket half the income from the country and beg foreign doners to feed your people. As long as you get rich, who cares?
And software licences? Why bother -- All you need is one pirated copy of XP to install on all the computers in the country.
Sorry about the cynicism, but in places where corruption reigns supreme, software licencing just isn't that big of a deal.
Yes, but swahili is regular enough that the infixes can be readily isolated based on a few simple rules.
On the other hand, I really question the need for a swahili spell-checker at all. Pronunciation is so consistant that if you can say it, you can spell it.
Swahili has to one of the most exception-free languages in the world.
Africa is just beginning to get connected to the world. While the cities have had communication for a while, the rural areas tend to be very isolated.
I think this is fertile breeding ground for open source. The problem is the microsoft is the only thing that seems to be known. With any computer training being "how to used windows" and pirated copies of windows readily available, it is hard to take a moral high ground, particularly in cultures where morality doesn't hold much sway -- read widespread corruption, AIDS.
Open source has a place, but only as part of a wider campain to get internet to rural areas.
And of course the question: Why do rural people need internet? I believe it is all about finding answers. If somebody wants to have a better life, they need access to information. Better farming techniques? Better building methods? How to avoid scams?
I'm going to Africa later this year for two years. I hope to play some small part in giving people a better life through access to information.
Michael
We won't get that straight-forward system until we get enough support for other manufacturers to support it.
I'm running XP on my laptop. I tried running Fedora but quickly came to a dead halt. My 802.11b card was not decently supported. I hacked around with suggested work-arounds for a while, but gave up eventually. Wider use will result in better vendor support. Somewhere along the line program installation will have to get easier.
I want wider support of Linux to make it easier for me to use Linux, not grandma. 10% of desktop use would be fine -- enough to get support, but not so ubiquitous to get the bad press.
Take a look at These pics of items apparently confiscated in Sacramento.