Hi! Maybe I didn't read the article carefully enough, but I was wondering anyone had a higher-dpi
image of the ad! I want to put it up in our office next to my Slackware box - I love the image of the Hacker! It's hilarious!
Have you continued your study of Esperanto?
on
Ask William Shatner
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Mr. Shatner,
I recently went to a screening of your cult
classic film, "Incubus". The most amazing thing about this movie was that all the dialog was spoken in Esperanto! Did you actually learn Esperanto for the role? Or were you simply reading off of cue cards?
Prices for the Sun LX50 start at $2,795 and rise to some $5,295 for a richer configuration. The systems will be generally available on Aug. 26, O Brien said.
I guess Sun won't be giving out free copies of its version of Linux at LWE tommorrow...?
Similar to the Perlmonks Vote for Paco campaign, this might be a chance to give a spy/adware product the lowest cnet rating ever!!!
Check out this post about Slashdot in 1985
on
1985 Usenet About Y2k
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Slashdot: Are you planning to read Slashdot on August 17th 2002?
Users: Probably not - it's a Saturday.
Slashdot: Well if you do, whatever you do, don't read Slashdot on August 17th! The internal coding of "August 17th 2002" triggers a perl script that sends Cowboy Neal's entire Boy Band mp3 library to your e-mail account...
Capitalism is the economic system of choice in the world's richest nation. What should we do with that wealth? Whatever we want! That's why it's called a free society.
It's not a Free Society for everyone in this country. Many American Blacks and Asians face major economic inequity. In West Oakland, CA, the percentage of people who can't pay their mortgage is up around 60%. The amount of children who live under the poverty line in Alameda County CA is staggering - around 40%!
Rich people in the USA do not cause world hunger.
Again, I would have to disagree with this. A major cause of hunger, is, as you've said, a lack of productive economies in hungry nations. But rather than pursue fair trade with producers in other nations, the small minority of people in the United States who control our trade policies (who I would call "Rich people in the USA") insist on subsidizing US farm crops (and dumping them all over the world) while forcing developing nations to export luxury crops to the US (like coffee - 1% of the world's arable land is used for coffee). The WTO and the World Bank, major tools of developed industrial nations, heavily favor the interests of the United States and Europe. The United States especially poor when it comes to pursuing sustainable development... Do you actually believe that wealthy interests in the US have a positive effect on world hunger? Exporting cheap food to poor countries destroys local economies (outcompeting local farmers!), the same way that a Wal-Mart comming to your town destroys local businesses...
In fact, they provide a lot of help to the world's hungry, both in terms of increasing awareness and generating funding.
You must be speaking about these people, otherwise, I think the wealthy in the US need to learn a lot about fundraising for the impoverished...
If ICANN were left to its own devices to fund 'projects' like Google, such 'projects' (Google is very much a profit-making business, not a 'project') would likely never come into existence.
Hunh? How did any of the following come about: Apache, Linux Kernel, GNU utilities, PHP, Perl, The Gimp, GNOME, KDE, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Debian, etc, etc, etc...
there just isn't the same level of competition out there in the np space.
Again, what about: GNOME vs. KDE, Apache vs. Anything, Mozilla vs. Konqeror vs. everything else, Linux vs. BSD vs. etc. etc. etc...
If you look at the distribution of wealth throughout the world, it is easy to say that economic inequity is the cause of hunger. But in fact the cause of hunger is the simple lack of productive economies in hunger-stricken regions. Why isn't Afghanistan competing with India and China in the tech sector?
A "computer" economy will not feed the people of a developing nation. Who will grow the food? Will those people be a perpetual underclass?
The source of the economic inequity between nations is largely a result of the laws that govern patents and trade, which are themselves a product of the nation's culture.
Wrong. The laws that govern patents and trade are dictated not by culture, but by the threat of force and sanctions by more powerful countries. Do you actually think that people in Jamaica, the Phillipines, or China want to be used as cheap labor for European and American tastes? What about Cuba? Do you think that the culture of Cuba dictates their economic situation? Or was if force from the United States?
It is what makes this discussion possible at both the idiological and the technological level.
People in non-western countries also talk freely about politics, technology, and other issues... I myself am Persian, and persians love to talk politics... It seems like you have been watching too much Fox News Network... In the United States, there is no guarantee of free discussion about political issues, as the squelching of public dissent in the face of ridiculous media conglomeration. Our current Federal Legislature and Presidential Administration is not exactly
For more information check out: the EFF, and FAIR...
Actually, economic inequity, and not lack of food, is the prevalent cause of hunger. Thus, in a way, making more people rich does create something wrong. Unless you consider it is ok that one sixth of the world's population faces chronic hunger. Like energy, there is only so much capital in the world...
I am saying ICANN (or someone like them) - not Venture Capitalists - should fund projects like Google.
Google has become such an important part of the
Internet for millions of average users. With this in mind, my friends and I often joke about what would happen if (knock on wood) Google were to go out of business. I suggest that ICANN should do something useful for a change, and fund Google as an official, non-profit project for searching the net.
Although I have heard that Google turns a good profit, what exactly is preventing Google from becoming a not-for-profit organization? Couldn't Google take the extra income from licensing its search to create better search technologies and pay the employees, rather than make some shareholders rich? Wouldn't this perhaps make Google a more sustainable organization?
The focus on the used-CD market comes at a time when new-CD sales continue to stagnate in the United States. Total sales last year were about $13 billion, unchanged from 2000.
Sales have been hurt largely by a surge in piracy, which the National Federation of the Phonographic Industry estimates has cost the music business $4.2 billion in lost revenue last year.
Hunh? If sales remain the same from one year to the next, how have Sales have been hurt? Does the record industry actually think that everybody who pirates or shares music would actually buy a copy of everything that they listen to? I think they would - if a CD cost $2 instead of $16.99 and Musicians got a bigger cut of the dough!
I don't know you or how much you understand about the type of music you listen too, but I do know that "Rap" is something that occurs in (and is merely one component of) "Hip-Hop" music. A rapper may be one component of a Hip-Hop song. "Hip-Hop" is a type of music, culture, and lifestyle. When you talk about Jazz, do you say, I listen to Trumpet music?
It is just this type of language that does a disservice to the cultures you are discussing. I would argue that DJ's have had much more to do with the practice of sampling and creating new music from copyrighted material than rappers - although of course, MC's do their fair share of mix and match themselves. By saying that you like rap music, are you trying to say that it was the rappers who turned you on to explore the history of Copyright? Is it mainstream made-by-MTV artists like Ice Cube who really prompts discussion about the boundaries of copyright, or is it more the work of lesser known artists like Afrika Bammbatta and Funkmaster Flex, etc., that really show us why copyright law should be criticized?
If you mentioned the term Hacker to a group of Slashdot folks, or EFF people, or the GNU people, many (most?) would think you are speaking about "Computer Programmers" or "Technical Explorers" or whatever. People in the mainstream, thanks to various media and silly use of terminology, would probably think you are talking about those who break into computer systems and vandalize web pages.
The last thing we need are academics deciding what terms and language falls into the mainstream consciousness. If you are willing to write books about how cultural precedents, like those in Hip-Hop or Computer Programming are pointing toward a future of copyright reform, I would hope that you would take the time to really delve into the cultures that you are writing about. If you are willing to co-opt a cultural reference to add credibility to academic writing, the least you can do is give credit where credit is due!
Siva and Lawrence Lessig (regarding L.L.'s comments about rap from THE FUTURE OF IDEAS) both need to understand that RAP is just one part of a larger culture of Hip-Hop. Vocalists and MC's are just one fragment of a culture that includes DJ's, artists, dancers, etc...
Referring to a whole branch of music, one that began with DJ's and Break Beats is ignorant and
almost insulting to the artists that create the music. You can tell - Siva's depth of understanding of Hip-Hop culture and sampling stops at corporate mega-artists like Jay-Z and that guy on all the Jennifer Lopez albums - hardly representative of much of Hip-Hop...
I haven't had a compelling need for my compiler's source code. I don't have the time to do compiler hacking when I'm trying to write code for my customers.
This, to me, is like saying, I have no compelling reason to participate in democratic elections, so I don't vote!
When I was working in a Bacterial Genomics lab, I used to crave faster, more powerful computers to crunch through genomic data. This type of computing power is a dream for bioinformaticists who want to, for example, create targeted cures for bacterial disease based on specific genetic idioms.
What is unfortunate is that we have an expensive, tax-payer funded processor farm that is dedicated to the useless pursuit of studying weapons of mass destruction. A great text about the myths of US nuclear policy can be found in Michio Kaku's (with Dan Axelrod) To Win a Nuclear War. It's in the style of a book like "The Hacker Crackdown", well researched, and really interesting.
Basically, many people lack proper opportunities to make a living. Desperate people are forced to do things like rip through all of our exported consumer electronics to scavenge copper wire and monitor parts. SVTC (see link above) shows how people resort to collecting potentially carcinogenic toner in cups for reuse in order to earn enough to eat.
Unfortunately, it's not really as if we are packaging our old computers and sending them to Africa or India for educational use. We are exporting our old computers to Asia - as toxic garbage.
Check out these facts, straight from the SVTC report mentioned above: Every year, the US exports about 10 million obsolete computers to Asia to be disposed of as hazardous waste. On average, each computer contains 13 pounds of plastic, 3 pounds of lead, enough cadmium to pollute 260,000 gallons of drinking water, enough chromium to pollute 10,000 gallons, and enough mercury to pollute 260,000 gallons.
Crazy, isn't it!!! This is a huge environmental problem, that until recently has gotten little or no press. SVTC was in the San Francisco paper recently, but Slashdotters would do well to look into solutions to this terrible ecological stress!
And that's a shame, because a person needs only access to a computer and sufficient interest in order to create his or her own route out of poverty.
I'm not really sure I understand where this person is comming from... The largest Social Movement is South America, Brasil's MST (landless workers movement) use Land reform, land occupation, education, and community building to escape poverty.
If only it was as simple as loading up a computer with free software! Actually, the computer industry is terrible when it comes to poverty! The highest concentration of highly toxic waste sites (known as SUPERFUND sites) are in the Silicon Valley. We ship about 200,000 computers, which (including the monitors) high levels of lead, cadmium, etc to developing countries, where they pollute landfills and communities. This increases conditions of poverty, not helps them.
Does anybody know if there is a driver for the onboard network device on this board? (It's the Realtek 8100). I know that there is a driver in the 2.4. series for a realtek RTL8139. Is this the driver to use on this board???
This is great news. When I was writing automated backup scripts for our office macs, I turned to the old release of MacPERL after learning what a convoluted piece of garbage AppleScript was...
Yes I have this study to cite: This Paper Written by the great Agroecologist Peter Rosset...
I guess I failed to point out the social benefits of smaller farms... In a system of larger agricultural farms, farm owners tend to be very rich and farm workers are very poor: the rural economy is transformed from one of self-suficiency to one in which farmers are forced to make livings
as wage earners. The point is, more small farms means more farmers producing for themselves rather
than becoming dependent on the poor wages derived from farm work.
Also, smaller farms (with diverse crops) can be more easily tended to without expensive (economically and socially!) pesticides or chemical fertilizers. This helps eliminate the health dangers associated with agrochemicals
(sometimes known as the "hidden economy" of industrial agriculture)...
I'm not sure what this problem of distribution is? In countries like Afghanistan, where only 11% of the land is arable, there is an understandable distribution problem. But what is more prevalent is a "policy" problem, where there is food available everywhere, and people don't have the money to buy food.
India currently has almost half of the world's hungry (defined as people who do not consume enough calories to sustain daily activity) at 250-300 million. However, India currently has about 60 to 70 tonnes of grain in storage, grown for export in accordance with IMF/World Bank Policy! This is insane. I suppose that I would say, to solve the distribution problem that India faces, would be to:
Focus on growing agriculture for local market
Eliminate ridiculous global institutions like the IMF, and the WTO... programs that favor the interests of industrial agriculture.
Focus on bringing more economic equity to the world...
A better technological breakthrough can be found in Agroecology. The problem with global agriculture is not with production. Global organizations such as the IMF and the WTO impose policies that force marginalized farming communities to grow food for export while they face lower incomes and a lack of self sustainablility. It has been shown that several smaller acre farms will outproduce a single larger industrial farm (in terms of production per acre).
Here is an excerpt from Peter Rosset, Joseph Collins, and Frances Moore Lappé's Lessons from the Green Revolution:
More Food and Yet More Hunger?
Despite three decades of rapidly expanding global food supplies, there are still an estimated 786 million hungry people in the world in the 1990s. Where are these 786 million hungry people? Since the early 1980s, media representations of famines in Africa have awakened Westerners to hunger there, but Africa represents less than one-quarter of the hunger in the world today. We are made blind to the day-in-day-out hunger suffered by hundreds of millions more. For example, by the mid-1980s, newspaper headlines were applauding the Asian success stories-India and Indonesia, we were told, had become "self-sufficient in food" or even "food exporters." But it is in Asia, precisely where Green Revolution seeds have contributed to the greatest production success, that roughly two-thirds of the undernourished in the entire world live.
According to Business Week magazine, "even though Indian granaries are overflowing now," thanks to the success of the Green Revolution in raising wheat and rice yields, "5,000 children die each day of malnutrition. One-third of India's 900 million people are poverty-stricken." Since the poor can't afford to buy what is produced, "the government is left trying to store millions of tons of foods. Some is rotting, and there is concern that rotten grain will find its way to public markets." The article concludes that the Green Revolution may have reduced India's grain imports substantially, but did not have a similar impact on hunger.
Such analysis raises serious questions about the number of hungry people in the world in 1970 versus 1990, spanning the two decades of major Green Revolution advances. At first glance, it looks as though great progress was made, with food production up and hunger down. The total food available per person in the world rose by 11 percent over those two decades, while the estimated number of hungry people fell from 942 million to 786 million, a 16 percent drop. This was apparent progress, for which those behind the Green Revolution were understandably happy to take the credit.
But these figures merit a closer look. If you eliminate China from the analysis, the number of hungry people in the rest of the world actually increased by more than 11 percent, from 536 to 597 million. In South America, for example, while per capita food supplies rose almost 8 percent, the number of hungry people also went up, by 19 percent. In south Asia, there was 9 percent more food per person by 1990, but there were also 9 percent more hungry people. Nor was it increased population that made for more hungry people. The total food available per person actually increased. What made possible greater hunger was the failure to address unequal access to food and food-producing resources.
The remarkable difference in China, where the number of hungry dropped from 406 million to 189 million, almost begs the question: which has been more effective at reducing hunger-the Green Revolution or the Chinese Revolution, where broad-based changes in access to land paved the way for rising living standards?
Whether the Green Revolution or any other strategy to boost food production will alleviate hunger depends on the economic, political, and cultural rules that people make. These rules determine who benefits as a supplier of the increased production-whose land and crops prosper and for whose profit-and who benefits as a consumer of the increased production-who gets the food and at what price.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey! Don't post it in plaintext! Use ROT13!
V fubccrq ng GuvaxTrrx ba Ncevy Sbbyf Qnl, naq nyy V tbg jnf guvf ybhfl fuveg!
Slackware was the first distro I used, and guess what - I just installed 9.0 and I love it.
I met Patrick once at a LinuxWorld Convention, and he was such a nice dude. Happy Birthday Slack!!!
Hi! Maybe I didn't read the article carefully enough, but I was wondering anyone had a higher-dpi image of the ad! I want to put it up in our office next to my Slackware box - I love the image of the Hacker! It's hilarious!
Mr. Shatner,
I recently went to a screening of your cult classic film, "Incubus". The most amazing thing about this movie was that all the dialog was spoken in Esperanto! Did you actually learn Esperanto for the role? Or were you simply reading off of cue cards?
Prices for the Sun LX50 start at $2,795 and rise to some $5,295 for a richer configuration. The systems will be generally available on Aug. 26, O Brien said.
I guess Sun won't be giving out free copies of its version of Linux at LWE tommorrow...?
Similar to the Perlmonks Vote for Paco campaign, this might be a chance to give a spy/adware product the lowest cnet rating ever!!!
Slashdot: Are you planning to read Slashdot on August 17th 2002?
Users: Probably not - it's a Saturday.
Slashdot: Well if you do, whatever you do, don't read Slashdot on August 17th! The internal coding of "August 17th 2002" triggers a perl script that sends Cowboy Neal's entire Boy Band mp3 library to your e-mail account...
...Installing slackware on 486s...
and I plan on using one to put NetBSD on a Mac SE/30. Why? Hmmm I don't know yet...
Capitalism is the economic system of choice in the world's richest nation. What should we do with that wealth? Whatever we want! That's why it's called a free society.
It's not a Free Society for everyone in this country. Many American Blacks and Asians face major economic inequity. In West Oakland, CA, the percentage of people who can't pay their mortgage is up around 60%. The amount of children who live under the poverty line in Alameda County CA is staggering - around 40%!
Rich people in the USA do not cause world hunger.Again, I would have to disagree with this. A major cause of hunger, is, as you've said, a lack of productive economies in hungry nations. But rather than pursue fair trade with producers in other nations, the small minority of people in the United States who control our trade policies (who I would call "Rich people in the USA") insist on subsidizing US farm crops (and dumping them all over the world) while forcing developing nations to export luxury crops to the US (like coffee - 1% of the world's arable land is used for coffee). The WTO and the World Bank, major tools of developed industrial nations, heavily favor the interests of the United States and Europe. The United States especially poor when it comes to pursuing sustainable development... Do you actually believe that wealthy interests in the US have a positive effect on world hunger? Exporting cheap food to poor countries destroys local economies (outcompeting local farmers!), the same way that a Wal-Mart comming to your town destroys local businesses...
In fact, they provide a lot of help to the world's hungry, both in terms of increasing awareness and generating funding.
You must be speaking about these people, otherwise, I think the wealthy in the US need to learn a lot about fundraising for the impoverished...
If ICANN were left to its own devices to fund 'projects' like Google, such 'projects' (Google is very much a profit-making business, not a 'project') would likely never come into existence.
Hunh? How did any of the following come about: Apache, Linux Kernel, GNU utilities, PHP, Perl, The Gimp, GNOME, KDE, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Debian, etc, etc, etc...
there just isn't the same level of competition out there in the np space.
Again, what about: GNOME vs. KDE, Apache vs. Anything, Mozilla vs. Konqeror vs. everything else, Linux vs. BSD vs. etc. etc. etc...
If you look at the distribution of wealth throughout the world, it is easy to say that economic inequity is the cause of hunger. But in fact the cause of hunger is the simple lack of productive economies in hunger-stricken regions. Why isn't Afghanistan competing with India and China in the tech sector?
A "computer" economy will not feed the people of a developing nation. Who will grow the food? Will those people be a perpetual underclass?
The source of the economic inequity between nations is largely a result of the laws that govern patents and trade, which are themselves a product of the nation's culture.
Wrong. The laws that govern patents and trade are dictated not by culture, but by the threat of force and sanctions by more powerful countries. Do you actually think that people in Jamaica, the Phillipines, or China want to be used as cheap labor for European and American tastes? What about Cuba? Do you think that the culture of Cuba dictates their economic situation? Or was if force from the United States?
It is what makes this discussion possible at both the idiological and the technological level.
People in non-western countries also talk freely about politics, technology, and other issues... I myself am Persian, and persians love to talk politics... It seems like you have been watching too much Fox News Network... In the United States, there is no guarantee of free discussion about political issues, as the squelching of public dissent in the face of ridiculous media conglomeration. Our current Federal Legislature and Presidential Administration is not exactly
For more information check out: the EFF, and FAIR...
Actually, economic inequity, and not lack of food, is the prevalent cause of hunger. Thus, in a way, making more people rich does create something wrong. Unless you consider it is ok that one sixth of the world's population faces chronic hunger. Like energy, there is only so much capital in the world...
I am saying ICANN (or someone like them) - not Venture Capitalists - should fund projects like Google.
Google has become such an important part of the Internet for millions of average users. With this in mind, my friends and I often joke about what would happen if (knock on wood) Google were to go out of business. I suggest that ICANN should do something useful for a change, and fund Google as an official, non-profit project for searching the net.
Although I have heard that Google turns a good profit, what exactly is preventing Google from becoming a not-for-profit organization? Couldn't Google take the extra income from licensing its search to create better search technologies and pay the employees, rather than make some shareholders rich? Wouldn't this perhaps make Google a more sustainable organization?
The focus on the used-CD market comes at a time when new-CD sales continue to stagnate in the United States. Total sales last year were about $13 billion, unchanged from 2000.
Sales have been hurt largely by a surge in piracy, which the National Federation of the Phonographic Industry estimates has cost the music business $4.2 billion in lost revenue last year.
Hunh? If sales remain the same from one year to the next, how have Sales have been hurt? Does the record industry actually think that everybody who pirates or shares music would actually buy a copy of everything that they listen to? I think they would - if a CD cost $2 instead of $16.99 and Musicians got a bigger cut of the dough!
I don't know you or how much you understand about the type of music you listen too, but I do know that "Rap" is something that occurs in (and is merely one component of) "Hip-Hop" music. A rapper may be one component of a Hip-Hop song. "Hip-Hop" is a type of music, culture, and lifestyle. When you talk about Jazz, do you say, I listen to Trumpet music?
It is just this type of language that does a disservice to the cultures you are discussing. I would argue that DJ's have had much more to do with the practice of sampling and creating new music from copyrighted material than rappers - although of course, MC's do their fair share of mix and match themselves. By saying that you like rap music, are you trying to say that it was the rappers who turned you on to explore the history of Copyright? Is it mainstream made-by-MTV artists like Ice Cube who really prompts discussion about the boundaries of copyright, or is it more the work of lesser known artists like Afrika Bammbatta and Funkmaster Flex, etc., that really show us why copyright law should be criticized?
If you mentioned the term Hacker to a group of Slashdot folks, or EFF people, or the GNU people, many (most?) would think you are speaking about "Computer Programmers" or "Technical Explorers" or whatever. People in the mainstream, thanks to various media and silly use of terminology, would probably think you are talking about those who break into computer systems and vandalize web pages.
The last thing we need are academics deciding what terms and language falls into the mainstream consciousness. If you are willing to write books about how cultural precedents, like those in Hip-Hop or Computer Programming are pointing toward a future of copyright reform, I would hope that you would take the time to really delve into the cultures that you are writing about. If you are willing to co-opt a cultural reference to add credibility to academic writing, the least you can do is give credit where credit is due!
Siva and Lawrence Lessig (regarding L.L.'s comments about rap from THE FUTURE OF IDEAS) both need to understand that RAP is just one part of a larger culture of Hip-Hop. Vocalists and MC's are just one fragment of a culture that includes DJ's, artists, dancers, etc...
Referring to a whole branch of music, one that began with DJ's and Break Beats is ignorant and almost insulting to the artists that create the music. You can tell - Siva's depth of understanding of Hip-Hop culture and sampling stops at corporate mega-artists like Jay-Z and that guy on all the Jennifer Lopez albums - hardly representative of much of Hip-Hop...
I haven't had a compelling need for my compiler's source code. I don't have the time to do compiler hacking when I'm trying to write code for my customers.
This, to me, is like saying, I have no compelling reason to participate in democratic elections, so I don't vote!
Well, actually, I really like AFI. I didn't know they were signed to Dreamworks! When did that happen?
I'll be happy when Dreamworks licenses all of its musical artists over to the EFF's Open Audio License!
Oh wait, after looking at Dreamworks list of artists, maybe not...
Mod this person up! I agree, this type of computer research is sick! Why isn't this processor farm being used for, say, bacterial genomics?
When I was working in a Bacterial Genomics lab, I used to crave faster, more powerful computers to crunch through genomic data. This type of computing power is a dream for bioinformaticists who want to, for example, create targeted cures for bacterial disease based on specific genetic idioms.
What is unfortunate is that we have an expensive, tax-payer funded processor farm that is dedicated to the useless pursuit of studying weapons of mass destruction. A great text about the myths of US nuclear policy can be found in Michio Kaku's (with Dan Axelrod) To Win a Nuclear War. It's in the style of a book like "The Hacker Crackdown", well researched, and really interesting.
If you are interested in stopping Nuclear Weapons Research in the US, another great site is that of Nobel Peace Prize Winning group Intl. Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). I think it's telling to compare IPPNW's site to the Defense Department's Moronic Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Team web site!
Well, it doesn't really work like that. Check out what happens to Old Computers at the Silicon Valley Toxics Commission site.
Basically, many people lack proper opportunities to make a living. Desperate people are forced to do things like rip through all of our exported consumer electronics to scavenge copper wire and monitor parts. SVTC (see link above) shows how people resort to collecting potentially carcinogenic toner in cups for reuse in order to earn enough to eat.
Unfortunately, it's not really as if we are packaging our old computers and sending them to Africa or India for educational use. We are exporting our old computers to Asia - as toxic garbage.
Check out these facts, straight from the SVTC report mentioned above: Every year, the US exports about 10 million obsolete computers to Asia to be disposed of as hazardous waste. On average, each computer contains 13 pounds of plastic, 3 pounds of lead, enough cadmium to pollute 260,000 gallons of drinking water, enough chromium to pollute 10,000 gallons, and enough mercury to pollute 260,000 gallons.
Crazy, isn't it!!! This is a huge environmental problem, that until recently has gotten little or no press. SVTC was in the San Francisco paper recently, but Slashdotters would do well to look into solutions to this terrible ecological stress!
And that's a shame, because a person needs only access to a computer and sufficient interest in order to create his or her own route out of poverty.
I'm not really sure I understand where this person is comming from... The largest Social Movement is South America, Brasil's MST (landless workers movement) use Land reform, land occupation, education, and community building to escape poverty.
If only it was as simple as loading up a computer with free software! Actually, the computer industry is terrible when it comes to poverty! The highest concentration of highly toxic waste sites (known as SUPERFUND sites) are in the Silicon Valley. We ship about 200,000 computers, which (including the monitors) high levels of lead, cadmium, etc to developing countries, where they pollute landfills and communities. This increases conditions of poverty, not helps them.
Does anybody know if there is a driver for the onboard network device on this board? (It's the Realtek 8100). I know that there is a driver in the 2.4. series for a realtek RTL8139. Is this the driver to use on this board???
This is great news. When I was writing automated backup scripts for our office macs, I turned to the old release of MacPERL after learning what a convoluted piece of garbage AppleScript was...
Congratulations to the MacPERL people
Yes I have this study to cite:
This Paper
Written by the great Agroecologist Peter Rosset...
I guess I failed to point out the social benefits of smaller farms... In a system of larger agricultural farms, farm owners tend to be very rich and farm workers are very poor: the rural economy is transformed from one of self-suficiency to one in which farmers are forced to make livings as wage earners. The point is, more small farms means more farmers producing for themselves rather than becoming dependent on the poor wages derived from farm work.
Also, smaller farms (with diverse crops) can be more easily tended to without expensive (economically and socially!) pesticides or chemical fertilizers. This helps eliminate the health dangers associated with agrochemicals (sometimes known as the "hidden economy" of industrial agriculture)...
I'm not sure what this problem of distribution is? In countries like Afghanistan, where only 11% of the land is arable, there is an understandable distribution problem. But what is more prevalent is a "policy" problem, where there is food available everywhere, and people don't have the money to buy food.
India currently has almost half of the world's hungry (defined as people who do not consume enough calories to sustain daily activity) at 250-300 million. However, India currently has about 60 to 70 tonnes of grain in storage, grown for export in accordance with IMF/World Bank Policy! This is insane. I suppose that I would say, to solve the distribution problem that India faces, would be to:
A better technological breakthrough can be found in Agroecology. The problem with global agriculture is not with production. Global organizations such as the IMF and the WTO impose policies that force marginalized farming communities to grow food for export while they face lower incomes and a lack of self sustainablility. It has been shown that several smaller acre farms will outproduce a single larger industrial farm (in terms of production per acre).
Here is an excerpt from Peter Rosset, Joseph Collins, and Frances Moore Lappé's Lessons from the Green Revolution:
More Food and Yet More Hunger?
Despite three decades of rapidly expanding global food supplies, there are still an estimated 786 million hungry people in the world in the 1990s. Where are these 786 million hungry people? Since the early 1980s, media representations of famines in Africa have awakened Westerners to hunger there, but Africa represents less than one-quarter of the hunger in the world today. We are made blind to the day-in-day-out hunger suffered by hundreds of millions more. For example, by the mid-1980s, newspaper headlines were applauding the Asian success stories-India and Indonesia, we were told, had become "self-sufficient in food" or even "food exporters." But it is in Asia, precisely where Green Revolution seeds have contributed to the greatest production success, that roughly two-thirds of the undernourished in the entire world live.
According to Business Week magazine, "even though Indian granaries are overflowing now," thanks to the success of the Green Revolution in raising wheat and rice yields, "5,000 children die each day of malnutrition. One-third of India's 900 million people are poverty-stricken." Since the poor can't afford to buy what is produced, "the government is left trying to store millions of tons of foods. Some is rotting, and there is concern that rotten grain will find its way to public markets." The article concludes that the Green Revolution may have reduced India's grain imports substantially, but did not have a similar impact on hunger.
Such analysis raises serious questions about the number of hungry people in the world in 1970 versus 1990, spanning the two decades of major Green Revolution advances. At first glance, it looks as though great progress was made, with food production up and hunger down. The total food available per person in the world rose by 11 percent over those two decades, while the estimated number of hungry people fell from 942 million to 786 million, a 16 percent drop. This was apparent progress, for which those behind the Green Revolution were understandably happy to take the credit.
But these figures merit a closer look. If you eliminate China from the analysis, the number of hungry people in the rest of the world actually increased by more than 11 percent, from 536 to 597 million. In South America, for example, while per capita food supplies rose almost 8 percent, the number of hungry people also went up, by 19 percent. In south Asia, there was 9 percent more food per person by 1990, but there were also 9 percent more hungry people. Nor was it increased population that made for more hungry people. The total food available per person actually increased. What made possible greater hunger was the failure to address unequal access to food and food-producing resources.
The remarkable difference in China, where the number of hungry dropped from 406 million to 189 million, almost begs the question: which has been more effective at reducing hunger-the Green Revolution or the Chinese Revolution, where broad-based changes in access to land paved the way for rising living standards?
Whether the Green Revolution or any other strategy to boost food production will alleviate hunger depends on the economic, political, and cultural rules that people make. These rules determine who benefits as a supplier of the increased production-whose land and crops prosper and for whose profit-and who benefits as a consumer of the increased production-who gets the food and at what price.