802.11a is generally much less crowded than 802.11 b/g and as fast as 802.11g. Wireless
in a crowded area can suck quite bad.
I'm trying to help out some folks with a network in their home office - at the moment there are Ethernet cables strewn everywhere and it's a hazard (not to mention constant cable failures from chair casters, etc.). Wifi seemed to be a likely solution, but when I arrived, I discovered that I can pick up 4, sometimes 5 nearby 802.11b/g signals from many places in the house, on channels 1, 6, and 11. The people I'm helping have several 2.4GHz cordless phones (including a very expensive 4-line one that would be painful to abandon). The neighbours on one side, believe it or not, have six 2.4GHz cordless phones (at least that's how many I've spotted around the house so far). I haven't been in the other neighbours' house but I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same over there.
So 802.11b/g is pretty hopeless. I travel with an access point, and gave it a try, but the signal conked out every few minutes.
I looked into 802.11a, but could not find a single router that did not get trashed in Amazon reviews and the like. If reviewers say it's hard to set up, I don't care about that. But they all had multiple reports of frequent lockups requiring resetting the hardware, which isn't acceptable. The situation here is such that any sufficiently disruptive technology problem, such as a router that crashes every few days, is going to require me flying 20000 miles (Asia to USA and back) to deal with it, and I would prefer to minimise that.
So we've just ordered a pair of Netgear XE104 HomePlug switches to see if those do the trick. Based on what I've read, I'm optimistic.
Where I live there aren't any 2.4GHz cordless phones (that I've seen) and wifi interference seems to be much less of a problem. It's all 1.9GHz DECT phones. But given the potential hazards of all this microwave energy in the home, I'm thinking of ditching the cordless phone and, if the XE104s work out, getting some of those for my apartment since I basically use the laptop in the same 2 or 3 places all the time anyway.
The thing Americans often forget is that while Macs are fairly common in the US, they're almost absent in the rest of the world, while Linux has had very significant penetration, even on the desktop, in Latin America, Europe, and Asia.
I live in Southeast Asia. There are two Mac stores within a 5 minutes' walk of my home. When I walk by Starbucks I typically see 2 or 3 Macs and 5 or 6 Wintel notebooks (running Windows; I am an incurable desktop-peeper). I went to a party on Friday, 3 people brought notebooks to DJ with, and two of those were Apple iBooks.
Conversely, the only time I have ever seen anyone but myself using Linux on the desktop is at the Linux users group meetings, and even there a good share of the computers were actually running Windows. The only person outside the LUG I know who runs it on the desktop is a foreigner (from the UK) who uses it to demonstrate high-end software that runs on Unix and Unix-alikes.
Cameroon is not typo-squatting anything. If you type in a domain name ending in.cm that hasn't been specifically assigned to someone, you get a fairly innocuous default page with links to ads. So what?
So that's exactly what typosquatting is. What do you think it is?
Sounds great but I would point out that urban environments would collapse without the rural areas providing resources. You didnt think all that food was grown in the store did you?
I don't recall anyone advocating nuclear attacks against the countryside, or mass executions of farmers. Did I miss something, or was your quote above simply a nonsequitur?
I can live BETTER (by my standards) for CHEAPER outside of the city.
Of course you can, because the people in the city will be subsidising you.
nor should I have to live somewhere I DON'T LIKE just because you feel that it will make the world better
Nobody's telling you where to live. Live in the middle of the desert or at the bottom of the sea for all I care. Just stop getting the people from the cities and the coasts to fund your choice.
Electric subways are only feasible in certain places, and they require an enormous amount of capital to build. It's not cheap tunneling under existing buildings and infrastructure. Most US cities aren't dense enough to support subways.
I agree; most US "cities" do suffer in this regard. Personally, I'd rather drown myself in a vat of lye than live (or make a prolonged visit to, for more than about a week) anywhere not dense enough to support subways, so my interest in such places and their problems is fairly offhand and highly abstract.
Once you start making people who live in the sparser areas pay their own way rather than sucking money from the cities, the factors to which you refer may change. You may find that the population starts to concentrate, and/or that populations in outlying areas decrease to the point where congestion and pollution are non-issues. Would be a treat for the die-hard ruralists, I suppose.
Diesel buses are quite nasty. Anyone arguing fuel efficiency for public transit is an idiot unless they're talking about 50 years in the future, because the buses on the road today are crap. There's a few places with diesel-electric or natural gas buses, but that's the exception, not the norm. Also don't forget, most buses are NOT loaded to capacity most of the time, so their passenger miles-per-gallon numbers are generally much worse. In general, public transit is very inefficient and very polluting.
That's because in general, public transit in the USA is at a 3rd-world standard.
Electric subways are fast and carry large numbers of people with decreased energy usage and pollution (depending on the particular power supply).
This is utterly infeasible and unworkable. The problem is that cities want to maximize the number of vehicle stops at red lights, in order to frustrate drivers and make them either not drive or choose alternate routes. Google for "traffic calming".
Traffic calming is used to encourage drivers to choose roads which are designed for higher capacity, yes. The idea is to ensure that traffic in residential areas with children playing and people trying to sleep is not a hazard or an annoyance. You'd have to really hate your neighbours to disagree with this.
Oh? So you have deer, pheasants, foxes, hawks and other assorted wildlife for neighbors? Fishing on a lake with no one else in sight? Woods to ramble in? Hunting within walking distance?
Sounds like hell on earth. Boring, culture-less, and to top it all off, a bunch of people wandering around shooting.
Neighborhoods where you know everyone personally, and their back door is always open for visitors?
Pretty much the exact opposite of my experience in the USA. The smaller the town, the more xenophobic and standoffish the people in it. Friendliest place I ever lived in the USA was New York City. Maybe things are different if you're white and like to go around shooting animals, but for the rest of us, no thanks.
Not really. SMTP is unencrypted, so if you're relying on encrypted webmail to secure your e-mail communication your security model is probably wrong. The only things which should really need an SSL connection per se are changing your password and deleting messages; by implication logging in would also need SSL to set up a secure cookie for these.
About half of my SMTP is encrypted; STARTTLS support is pretty widespread in MTAs these days. Turn it on in yours and you might be surprised.
But in any case, the opportunistically intercepting a message or two is one thing. Being able to log into someone's mail account and read all their old and sent mail, read their new mail whenever you want, and forge mail from them with valid headers, is quite another kettle of fish, and considerably more serious.
My first reaction was "Good Lord, how stupid can people get?" - I mean, does this mean that if you set up a wireless network in accordance with their regulations, and it still gets abused (through WEP weaknesses or whatever), they have implicitly invited you to sue them?
But then I thought back to ohhh, yesterday, when I was wrapping up a work trip to Thailand. When I arrived I had bought a SIM card at a dusty little family shop and the cashier who installed it into my phone signed me up for a bunch of promo offers including the loathsome Calling Melody (which I never figured out how to disable) and 50 free hours of GPRS (pretty good considering the card cost me US$7.50).
My hotels had free wifi so I didn't end up using that much of the GPRS time. Yesterday, at the airport, I figured I might as well use some more of it up, so I popped open the trusty iBook and turned on internet sharing with SSID name "Free Internet!"
Within 15 minutes I had 5 or 6 people on it (must have been painfully slow for them). I was too tired to do anything useful, but just for the heck of it I started up ethereal to see to what ends my largesse was being used. It was remarkable how trusting (or probably ignorant) people were - as well as how many unencrypted port-80 webmail servers and office intranets there are out there.
So maybe the real value of the rule in TFA is to protect the users from themselves, rather than protecting the AP owners. When you connect to an unknown AP you never really know what could be going on with your traffic unless you encrypt and authenticate it.
I feel a little sad about that list, as it contains no academic applications at all. No physical simulations. No Latin verb conjugators. No statistical calculators. Are there none around, or are they all ugly? Or are they simply outside the journalists sphere of interest?
He's a Mac user. He does all his statistical calculation and Latin verb conjugations in his head, from memory.
Sorry, but no matter how slick the words, it is still depriving someone of the compensation for their work. Stealing is a general category, and the slick technical wording falls clearly under that category. I can think of a few others: Working for someone who doesn't pay you the commission due, for instance, is not the same as armed robbery. Someone not paying you for the software you wrote for him is fraud. They are all forms of stealing.
So you content that depriving someone of compensation for their work is "stealing"? Pretty iffy, but okay, I'll bite.
How about if David builds a table with the intent to sell it, and I come along and build a better table for less money, and everyone buys mine instead? David has been deprived of compensation for his work.
How about if David builds a table and it falls apart when he's in the process of delivering it, and I refuse to pay? Deprived of compensation.
David builds a table, as requested, and also builds a set of chairs, which I never asked for and refuse to buy. Whoops, there's that compensation deprivation again.
Your definition doesn't hold up. Likewise all rationalisations by people who wish they could call unauthorized copying stealing, which they (you) do because they (you) need to conjure up moral equivalency in order to advance an argument that the offenses are of equal gravity. It's simply not stealing. It may be immoral, or harmful, or illegal, but stealing is not the word. Nor is piracy "murdering" the person's income or "kidnapping" their revenues or "trespassing" on their creation or "jaywalking" all over their rights.
Oh, please. Almost all of the government's manpower and budget is expended on the things you dismiss as "bread and circuses," sidelines to distract the masses.
I suggest a mild dose of Occam's Razor might be in order here.
Sorry, I was using purse in the UK English sense, not the US English sense. We say handbag where you say purse, and we say purse where you say... I don't know actually what you say.
In UK English, a purse is literally "a bag for holding coins"; more practiacally these days a woman's purse is a large wallet that has a coin holding compartment. Wallet is optimised for people with trouser pockets; purse is optimised for people with bags.
In the US they say "purse" when they mean "vagina", so be careful with that one. The Yank word for a small coin bag is "bum". The thing that men carry their money inside, which you call a "wallet", in the US is called a "pants fanny". Hope that's helpful.
I looked up the cost of a new Honda Accord here and there, here it's about 18,225 USD*, which is about $20,000, there it's about 15,42,000 Rs, which apparently translates to $37,143.
A car is not something you buy every day. Amortize the cost over the lifespan of the car and it will not end up being such a significant contributor to your cost of living. Or buy a Maruti!
I also looked at housing costs in Ottawa vs Goa. The average cost of a house in Ottawa is $219,713, while the average cost of a house in Goa appears to be around 55,000 pounds, which is around $113,853.
I don't know how you came up with the "average" cost of a house in Goa, but it is nowhere near that high. And Goa has a lot of foreigners bidding up prices; it's not typical.
Finally, I looked at food costs. Various fine dining restaurants here would cost about $50 on average for two people, there it's about 1200 Rs, which is about $29.
Rs1200 is a LOT for a meal. More interesting is the cost of meals you are likely to eat on a regular basis. You can easily eat out for US$0.50 at a basic place.
Overall, it doesn't appear that $800 in India buys more than $2900 in Canada. If anything, it buys quite a bit less
You are making the mistake of comparing identical goods based on what is commonplace and cost-effective where you come from. This is not a way of estimating cost of living, it's a way of estimating the cost of replicating Canada in India.
An Indian who did the same thing in Canada would be doubly shocked by the price. How much would Canadians spend for a live-in maid and cook? For authentic Indian food? For weekend road trips to tropical beaches? To have fresh coconuts delivered to your door each morning?To see elephants in the wild?
I've been pondering a lot about this, the costumer costs don't seem to depend on wether something is outsourced or not, so in the end it'll go to stock holders/CEO, etc.
It depends on what the rest of the market is doing.
If Company A is the only widget manufacturer to outsource offshore, and is saving 20% on production costs, there is no reason for them to drop their prices by more than a few percent. All they have to do is undercut the competition by enough to get noticed, and they can capture the rest of the savings as profit.
However, once everyone starts doing it, prices go down. Many consumer goods in the USA are much cheaper than they have ever been before, especially clothes.
Having travelled the breadth of Europe by train, from the Iberian peninsula to the Ural mountains, I've only once seen a request (not even an obligation) for no cell phone use in the car. "Banning" of cell phones is not common there, and the situation is much the same as in the U.S.
Perhaps you need to learn the language most commonly spoken on the Iberian peninsula before making these proclamations. I took the AVE from Sevilla to Madrid two weeks ago and it was clearly announced in Spanish that talking on cell phones was only allowed in the corridors between cars. Or was Spain your "once"?
Noise-cancelling headphones work great for airplane background noise.
They are near-worthless for dealing with the noise created by those who feel their stupid loud conversation is more important than the 30 people nearby they are disturbing..
In Malaysia you buy pirated copies in shops at the mall like normal, and they offer low ($0.50) and high ($2.00) quality, and even let you preview the copy to make sure it's up to your standards.
Earlier this week the shops in downtown Kuala Lumpur (capital of Malaysia, for those unfamiliar with southeast Asian geography) were shut down by one of those periodic raids, the ones where the cops take all the DVDs they find on the premises and smash 'em up and email some photos to the MPAA. Obviously that's not many, because the guy outside the mall selling the plastic toys that nobody buys has already phoned up to the shops to let them know the police van is looking for a parking spot.
The shops that sold exclusively movies and TV shows were shuttered up. The ones that also sold pirate software and games were open, but the movie shelves were empty. A few guys were loitering furtively in the corridors of Plaza Imbi (the most grungy and underworldy of the big pirate malls in central KL) with small folders of movies but even there the shops were shut. I ran into one of the shop guys at a restaurant Tuesday night and he made it sound like the raids were their annual holiday leave system.
Just for fun I tried to find a shop selling legit DVDs but never came across one, except for the always-deserted video sections at Borders and Tower Records. So I guess everyone had to watch shitty Malaysian satellite TV for a few days. The cinemas were packed, but they always are.
By Wednesday evening, it was back to business as usual for all.
The goal of the project was to help jumpstart Computer Literacy, not just give them a word processor and spreadsheet.
For these laptops to actually have a deep affect and teach a lot, they need to be able to get into the deep parts of the OS. If a kid learns how to type up a report, that might help himself, but if a kid learns how to hack a kernel, it would help his community.
Your comments are terribly unrealistic.
In a rich, developed country, where computer jobs are plentiful and there is all kinds of time to sit around puttering on the machine, maybe 1 in 50,000 people get anywhere near "hack[ing] a kernel". You think this 0.002% are the only people whose computer literacy helps their communities?
The children who help their communities are going to be the ones who learn to read, learn how to look up information about health, agriculture, engineering, and learn how to find market data about the goods they are consuming and producing.
And putting all that aside, even with OSX installed on the machine, there's nothing stopping your putative malnourished kernel hacker from installing Linux when/if the time comes.
As someone who spent a fair bit of time in the developing world tasked with getting people working in Linux, I have come to the conclusion that without the all-too-rare emergence of a hyper-motivated and highly intelligent geek who is part of the community and committed to stay (despite the economic opportunities that these traits would provide elsewhere), such efforts are largely a disservice. Linux still requires too much handholding for people without strong computer backgrounds. Once the foreigners with the weird software have flown away, they can only provide so much support, and eventually either the computers stop being used or someone with a practical bent installs Windows on them.
I'm not sure whether that (installing Windows) is an option with this hardware, but without it, I think there are going to be a lot of brightly-coloured doorstops sprucing up African villages over the next few years.
Because these "spam kings" (ok, let's find a new, more acceptable phrase, like "spam dorks") tend to hide out in countries that either have a) no formalized relations with the US
Huh? Can you name one country that has no formalised relations with the US, but has enough bandwidth to send any significant amount of spam? It's not like Iran and North Korea are writhing with OC-192s.
I have never added a + to any phone numbers in my cell phone, and yet it has always worked, and
I am Canadian, and live in Canada. I am not an American, and am not US-centric.
The dial plans in the US and Canada are identical, hence "Else you won't be able to dial it when you go to another country where the dialing sequences are different". Your dial plan was developed by Bell, whose center of gravity was solidly placed in the USA.
Perhaps the shibboleth (and thanks for the new word for my vocabulary, by the way) lies between those who assume that everything that isn't European must be American, and those who know there are other countries in this world that belong to neither?
Silly me. I'm in Malaysia, but until you opened my eyes I always thought it was either the USA or Europe.
P.S. All snarking aside, shibboleth is a great word! Glad you like it.
I'd be interested to hear what technical reasons Skype has for forcing the use of the plus sign at the beginning of the phone numbers -- it does seem superfluous.
1. To disambiguate from numeric Skype IDs.
2. For years the plus notation has been the correct way to write phone numbers. When you store a number on your cell phone, you use a plus sign, right? Else you won't be able to dial it when you go to another country where the dialing sequences are different. Come to think of it, maybe this is a 21st century shibboleth that distinguishes US-centric folks from the others.
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I'm trying to help out some folks with a network in their home office - at the moment there are Ethernet cables strewn everywhere and it's a hazard (not to mention constant cable failures from chair casters, etc.). Wifi seemed to be a likely solution, but when I arrived, I discovered that I can pick up 4, sometimes 5 nearby 802.11b/g signals from many places in the house, on channels 1, 6, and 11. The people I'm helping have several 2.4GHz cordless phones (including a very expensive 4-line one that would be painful to abandon). The neighbours on one side, believe it or not, have six 2.4GHz cordless phones (at least that's how many I've spotted around the house so far). I haven't been in the other neighbours' house but I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same over there.
So 802.11b/g is pretty hopeless. I travel with an access point, and gave it a try, but the signal conked out every few minutes.
I looked into 802.11a, but could not find a single router that did not get trashed in Amazon reviews and the like. If reviewers say it's hard to set up, I don't care about that. But they all had multiple reports of frequent lockups requiring resetting the hardware, which isn't acceptable. The situation here is such that any sufficiently disruptive technology problem, such as a router that crashes every few days, is going to require me flying 20000 miles (Asia to USA and back) to deal with it, and I would prefer to minimise that.
So we've just ordered a pair of Netgear XE104 HomePlug switches to see if those do the trick. Based on what I've read, I'm optimistic.
Where I live there aren't any 2.4GHz cordless phones (that I've seen) and wifi interference seems to be much less of a problem. It's all 1.9GHz DECT phones. But given the potential hazards of all this microwave energy in the home, I'm thinking of ditching the cordless phone and, if the XE104s work out, getting some of those for my apartment since I basically use the laptop in the same 2 or 3 places all the time anyway.
I live in Southeast Asia. There are two Mac stores within a 5 minutes' walk of my home. When I walk by Starbucks I typically see 2 or 3 Macs and 5 or 6 Wintel notebooks (running Windows; I am an incurable desktop-peeper). I went to a party on Friday, 3 people brought notebooks to DJ with, and two of those were Apple iBooks.
Conversely, the only time I have ever seen anyone but myself using Linux on the desktop is at the Linux users group meetings, and even there a good share of the computers were actually running Windows. The only person outside the LUG I know who runs it on the desktop is a foreigner (from the UK) who uses it to demonstrate high-end software that runs on Unix and Unix-alikes.
So that's exactly what typosquatting is. What do you think it is?
I don't recall anyone advocating nuclear attacks against the countryside, or mass executions of farmers. Did I miss something, or was your quote above simply a nonsequitur?
Of course you can, because the people in the city will be subsidising you.
Nobody's telling you where to live. Live in the middle of the desert or at the bottom of the sea for all I care. Just stop getting the people from the cities and the coasts to fund your choice.
I agree; most US "cities" do suffer in this regard. Personally, I'd rather drown myself in a vat of lye than live (or make a prolonged visit to, for more than about a week) anywhere not dense enough to support subways, so my interest in such places and their problems is fairly offhand and highly abstract.
Once you start making people who live in the sparser areas pay their own way rather than sucking money from the cities, the factors to which you refer may change. You may find that the population starts to concentrate, and/or that populations in outlying areas decrease to the point where congestion and pollution are non-issues. Would be a treat for the die-hard ruralists, I suppose.
That's because in general, public transit in the USA is at a 3rd-world standard.
Electric subways are fast and carry large numbers of people with decreased energy usage and pollution (depending on the particular power supply).
Traffic calming is used to encourage drivers to choose roads which are designed for higher capacity, yes. The idea is to ensure that traffic in residential areas with children playing and people trying to sleep is not a hazard or an annoyance. You'd have to really hate your neighbours to disagree with this.
Sounds like hell on earth. Boring, culture-less, and to top it all off, a bunch of people wandering around shooting.
Pretty much the exact opposite of my experience in the USA. The smaller the town, the more xenophobic and standoffish the people in it. Friendliest place I ever lived in the USA was New York City. Maybe things are different if you're white and like to go around shooting animals, but for the rest of us, no thanks.
About half of my SMTP is encrypted; STARTTLS support is pretty widespread in MTAs these days. Turn it on in yours and you might be surprised.
But in any case, the opportunistically intercepting a message or two is one thing. Being able to log into someone's mail account and read all their old and sent mail, read their new mail whenever you want, and forge mail from them with valid headers, is quite another kettle of fish, and considerably more serious.
My first reaction was "Good Lord, how stupid can people get?" - I mean, does this mean that if you set up a wireless network in accordance with their regulations, and it still gets abused (through WEP weaknesses or whatever), they have implicitly invited you to sue them?
But then I thought back to ohhh, yesterday, when I was wrapping up a work trip to Thailand. When I arrived I had bought a SIM card at a dusty little family shop and the cashier who installed it into my phone signed me up for a bunch of promo offers including the loathsome Calling Melody (which I never figured out how to disable) and 50 free hours of GPRS (pretty good considering the card cost me US$7.50).
My hotels had free wifi so I didn't end up using that much of the GPRS time. Yesterday, at the airport, I figured I might as well use some more of it up, so I popped open the trusty iBook and turned on internet sharing with SSID name "Free Internet!"
Within 15 minutes I had 5 or 6 people on it (must have been painfully slow for them). I was too tired to do anything useful, but just for the heck of it I started up ethereal to see to what ends my largesse was being used. It was remarkable how trusting (or probably ignorant) people were - as well as how many unencrypted port-80 webmail servers and office intranets there are out there.
So maybe the real value of the rule in TFA is to protect the users from themselves, rather than protecting the AP owners. When you connect to an unknown AP you never really know what could be going on with your traffic unless you encrypt and authenticate it.
He's a Mac user. He does all his statistical calculation and Latin verb conjugations in his head, from memory.
Don't worry lah, that's the only meaning for the word I was aware of.
So you content that depriving someone of compensation for their work is "stealing"? Pretty iffy, but okay, I'll bite.
How about if David builds a table with the intent to sell it, and I come along and build a better table for less money, and everyone buys mine instead? David has been deprived of compensation for his work.
How about if David builds a table and it falls apart when he's in the process of delivering it, and I refuse to pay? Deprived of compensation.
David builds a table, as requested, and also builds a set of chairs, which I never asked for and refuse to buy. Whoops, there's that compensation deprivation again.
Your definition doesn't hold up. Likewise all rationalisations by people who wish they could call unauthorized copying stealing, which they (you) do because they (you) need to conjure up moral equivalency in order to advance an argument that the offenses are of equal gravity. It's simply not stealing. It may be immoral, or harmful, or illegal, but stealing is not the word. Nor is piracy "murdering" the person's income or "kidnapping" their revenues or "trespassing" on their creation or "jaywalking" all over their rights.
Oh, please. Almost all of the government's manpower and budget is expended on the things you dismiss as "bread and circuses," sidelines to distract the masses.
I suggest a mild dose of Occam's Razor might be in order here.
In the US they say "purse" when they mean "vagina", so be careful with that one. The Yank word for a small coin bag is "bum". The thing that men carry their money inside, which you call a "wallet", in the US is called a "pants fanny". Hope that's helpful.
A car is not something you buy every day. Amortize the cost over the lifespan of the car and it will not end up being such a significant contributor to your cost of living. Or buy a Maruti!
I don't know how you came up with the "average" cost of a house in Goa, but it is nowhere near that high. And Goa has a lot of foreigners bidding up prices; it's not typical.
Rs1200 is a LOT for a meal. More interesting is the cost of meals you are likely to eat on a regular basis. You can easily eat out for US$0.50 at a basic place.
You are making the mistake of comparing identical goods based on what is commonplace and cost-effective where you come from. This is not a way of estimating cost of living, it's a way of estimating the cost of replicating Canada in India.
An Indian who did the same thing in Canada would be doubly shocked by the price. How much would Canadians spend for a live-in maid and cook? For authentic Indian food? For weekend road trips to tropical beaches? To have fresh coconuts delivered to your door each morning?To see elephants in the wild?
It depends on what the rest of the market is doing.
If Company A is the only widget manufacturer to outsource offshore, and is saving 20% on production costs, there is no reason for them to drop their prices by more than a few percent. All they have to do is undercut the competition by enough to get noticed, and they can capture the rest of the savings as profit.
However, once everyone starts doing it, prices go down. Many consumer goods in the USA are much cheaper than they have ever been before, especially clothes.
I've flown JetBlue probably 50 times on a half-dozen different routes, never once to or from New York.
Time to check your hazmat suit for leaks?
And I've actually seen the conductor remove someone from the quiet car for continuing to use his phone after a warning. People were cheering.
Perhaps you need to learn the language most commonly spoken on the Iberian peninsula before making these proclamations. I took the AVE from Sevilla to Madrid two weeks ago and it was clearly announced in Spanish that talking on cell phones was only allowed in the corridors between cars. Or was Spain your "once"?
Noise-cancelling headphones work great for airplane background noise.
They are near-worthless for dealing with the noise created by those who feel their stupid loud conversation is more important than the 30 people nearby they are disturbing..
Earlier this week the shops in downtown Kuala Lumpur (capital of Malaysia, for those unfamiliar with southeast Asian geography) were shut down by one of those periodic raids, the ones where the cops take all the DVDs they find on the premises and smash 'em up and email some photos to the MPAA. Obviously that's not many, because the guy outside the mall selling the plastic toys that nobody buys has already phoned up to the shops to let them know the police van is looking for a parking spot.
The shops that sold exclusively movies and TV shows were shuttered up. The ones that also sold pirate software and games were open, but the movie shelves were empty. A few guys were loitering furtively in the corridors of Plaza Imbi (the most grungy and underworldy of the big pirate malls in central KL) with small folders of movies but even there the shops were shut. I ran into one of the shop guys at a restaurant Tuesday night and he made it sound like the raids were their annual holiday leave system.
Just for fun I tried to find a shop selling legit DVDs but never came across one, except for the always-deserted video sections at Borders and Tower Records. So I guess everyone had to watch shitty Malaysian satellite TV for a few days. The cinemas were packed, but they always are.
By Wednesday evening, it was back to business as usual for all.
Your comments are terribly unrealistic.
In a rich, developed country, where computer jobs are plentiful and there is all kinds of time to sit around puttering on the machine, maybe 1 in 50,000 people get anywhere near "hack[ing] a kernel". You think this 0.002% are the only people whose computer literacy helps their communities?
The children who help their communities are going to be the ones who learn to read, learn how to look up information about health, agriculture, engineering, and learn how to find market data about the goods they are consuming and producing.
And putting all that aside, even with OSX installed on the machine, there's nothing stopping your putative malnourished kernel hacker from installing Linux when/if the time comes.
As someone who spent a fair bit of time in the developing world tasked with getting people working in Linux, I have come to the conclusion that without the all-too-rare emergence of a hyper-motivated and highly intelligent geek who is part of the community and committed to stay (despite the economic opportunities that these traits would provide elsewhere), such efforts are largely a disservice. Linux still requires too much handholding for people without strong computer backgrounds. Once the foreigners with the weird software have flown away, they can only provide so much support, and eventually either the computers stop being used or someone with a practical bent installs Windows on them.
I'm not sure whether that (installing Windows) is an option with this hardware, but without it, I think there are going to be a lot of brightly-coloured doorstops sprucing up African villages over the next few years.
Huh? Can you name one country that has no formalised relations with the US, but has enough bandwidth to send any significant amount of spam? It's not like Iran and North Korea are writhing with OC-192s.
The dial plans in the US and Canada are identical, hence "Else you won't be able to dial it when you go to another country where the dialing sequences are different". Your dial plan was developed by Bell, whose center of gravity was solidly placed in the USA.
Silly me. I'm in Malaysia, but until you opened my eyes I always thought it was either the USA or Europe.
P.S. All snarking aside, shibboleth is a great word! Glad you like it.
1. To disambiguate from numeric Skype IDs.
2. For years the plus notation has been the correct way to write phone numbers. When you store a number on your cell phone, you use a plus sign, right? Else you won't be able to dial it when you go to another country where the dialing sequences are different. Come to think of it, maybe this is a 21st century shibboleth that distinguishes US-centric folks from the others.