FYI, I'm not an American, and the page about Cuban human rights abuses which I linked to is a European/international human rights group. So I don't think your generalization about other countries is particularly relevant.
Having lived in Canada for a while, it's certainly true there. Canadians don't see Cuba as any worse than dozens of other repressive countries, and better than many. (They wouldn't vacation there so often nor be their #1 trading partner otherwise)
Any comparison in terms of repressiveness between the two countries is largely silly, even despite the current overreaction to terrorism.
I'm not really trying to claim the US is as bad as Cuba. We're not. But it's nowhere as black and white as many Americans believe- our staggering imprisonment rate for quite trivial crimes should be a national shame. (And you're right- it's a racial issue. I'm part of a multiracial family. I can get away with things my kids will never be able to. See http://www.norml.org/images/state_arrests_2004/AR_ Page_69.gif)
I don't buy the pot smoker comparison, either: show me the pot smoker (not dealer) who is in jail for one to four years for mere possession of single-person quantities.
Marijuana possession felony convictions comprised "less than 1%" of the total of 893,630 felony convictions in state courts. Assume 0.5%, ~4,500 people in 1992
62% of those convicted of drug possession felonies were sentenced to incarceration (33% in state prisons and 29% in local jails) Ignore local jails, ~1500 people in state prison.
Prison sentences are for long-term confinement (usually for over a year) in a state facility.
So a back-of-the-envelope calculation gives ~1500 people per year getting sentenced to more than a year in jail for simple posession.
Someone from NORML could probably give better figures.
(The true irony of this whole discussion is that I don't smoke pot.)
Re:Are you talking about the US or Cuba?
on
Cuba Switching to Linux
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· Score: 4, Insightful
First, there's an issue of degree. There are far more ordinary people in Cuban prisons, who would not be imprisoned in any free country.
Perhaps. They jail political dissidents. We jail pot smokers. Thus, the US has the highest imprisonment rate in the world. (Or very close- we don't know North Korea's) Cuba's not even in the top ten.
Second, I wasn't defending the US, I was pointing out that Cuba is still a very repressive place, and those who want to pretend that everything's cool and its problems should just be accepted with a wink are themselves collaborating in the repression of the Cuban people.
I'd be one of the last to defend Cuba- it's a wreck of a country due to a meglomanical dictator. The world will be a better place when Castro is worm food.
But other countries simply don't see Cuba with anywhere near the level of hatred in the US. They see us pointing fingers at Cuba's repressive practices while we're busy keeping people in legal limbo forever in our own tiny slice of Cuba.
If we had cleaner hands other countries might be more willing to listen to us about Cuba.
Summary: you can be arrested and detained for up to four years because the police think you appear dangerous and might commit a crime.
And what crime has Jose Padilla committed? He's been in a military jail for years, denied a lawyer because the powers that be in the US have declared him a terrorist, although they don't seem to want to actually charge him with anything.
Seems to me that we're more than happy to detain people too when we don't like them.
And before you dismiss me as some liberal loony, check that link again. It's not just liberals pissed about Bush trampling all over the Bill of Rights in the name of "keeping us safe from terror."
And exactly what kind of carbon is that? We only want that pure C-12, none of that C-13 or C-14 crap.
(In seriousness, when I was in grad school one of the groups at my school had borrowed a pure C-13 diamond for some calibration reason. They lost it for a while, causing much panic. I have no idea what it was worth, but I'm sure it was a fortune.)
There is a spring that holds the throttle closed, and when you push the gas pedal the cable pulls it open. If the cable breaks then the spring would still close it back.
Um, no. Some cars fail closed. I can tell you for certain that VW Vanagons fail open, and when telling people this story other folks tell me about cars they know that fail open.
Fail closed is an obvious safety measure, so I don't know why anyone would use otherwise, but the cable literally broke on the Vanagon, and the throttle maxed out. A temporary fix broke about 30 minutes later, with the same results.
It's all servo-driven, no linkage between the throttle and the gas pedal at all. If I had thought to check stuff like that I wouldn't have bought it.
And a cable is any better? I've been a car where the accelerator cable broke and left the throttle wide open. I suspect a servo might well be more robust than a cable.
Luckily it was a 70's era VM Vanagon camper. I think we went from 62 to 63 in the 5 minutes or so we spent playing with the accelerator pedal to see what the problem was.
Interesting caveat from an EDUCAUSE talk by them a few years back- OCW doesn't scale very well. Not in terms of looking at the sites, but in terms of of putting up new courses.
Why? Copyright. Professors love to use copyrighted material, and they can under fair use within a course. (Course readers, photos, movies, etc) But you can't just throw it up on that thar Interweb thingie without talking to the folks who own the copyright.
OCW has a team of people that do nothing other than copyright clearance. One architecture course had 900-odd photos that were the core of the course. Every single one was copyrighted, and there were a huge number of different owners. The course wasn't on OCW simply because they hadn't managed to get everyone to sign off.
It's not less optimal for *us*. That's one of the key points in my talk- for many people it would be the wrong call.
Yes, there are better conversion utilities for BB and WebCT. We don't care- we didn't move from either and have no plans to go there. Sakai migration might be a problem if we do move there, but I'm sure I can whip something up. Retraining will suck though.
I'm a sunk cost-it was part of my unofficial job description to get *something* up and running. I like to program, so I was able to do it. I'm more expensive than a Blackboard support tech anyway for a variety of reasons.
Dokeos has fewer user configuration options. On the other hand, I've integrated it with our uPortal, SCT Powercampus student information system, library e-reserve system and others. Most of these would have been high-cost options for Blackboard, some wouldn't have even been possible. (I get rid of BB and WebCT salespeople by asking about Powercampus integration details. They go away and never come back.)
The basic reasons we went with Dokeos? We needed something, we had a budget crunch and BB and WebCT had just announced huge price increases. Faculty were ambivalent at best and hostile at worst to a CMS. Most of the high end features of BB and WebCT were just not needed, but integration into an unusual campus configuration was.
Dokeos did enough and did it for close to $0 up front cost. I sold this as a 3-year project. We just finished year two. I got the poll results from the faculty yesterday- 82% of faculty rate the system as excellent or good, just 4% as poor.
For us, this was an optimal solution-it's an Open Source success story. If I'd been at Penn State, I would have been (rightfully) fired, but I'm not and my job is quite secure.
I'm the guy who recommended we use an Open Source course management system (Dokeos) here at the college rather than buying Blackboard or WebCT. (Come see my talk at ASCUE2005 next month!) Looking at TFA, some comments since I don't agree with
Reduced dependence on software vendors. Somewhat true. I'm still locked in to the product- switching will be an enormous pain, with lots of conversion costs no matter if we're proprietary or Open Source. Switching would actually be easier with a commercial product- conduits exist for Blackboard to WebCT and back. Nothing of the sort exists for Dokeos and Sakai, the project we'd most likely move to. Plus, I've also had to deal with a fork where the lead developer took his ball and went home. That was a little tense.
Lower total cost of ownership. Almost certainly untrue. Yes, Blackboard would rape us on fees. But you can hire Blackboard training and support people cheap. Dokeos realistically requires a programmer to support. Luckily I like to program, but my job description when I was hired never mentioned that. (I'm rewriting it this week)
Easier to customize Very dependent on product. The user interface of Dokeos is vastly less configurable than Blackboard. On the flip side, since I can tweak code I have it firmly embedded into half a dozen systems here.
Higher level of security Very, very doubtful, again with a few exceptions. Back in the days I installed Claroline (Dokeos' parent) it required register_globals=on. There have been other places where the developers have found SQL and code injection points.
I'm a big advocate for Open Source, but those people checking "reduced dependence on software vendors" probably haven't had a serious fork in a project a year after rolling it out to 1000 users.
Re:Deep wide education distribution networks...
on
Johnny Can So Program
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· Score: 1
I know exactly what you mean. Why just today I went to see my doctor about an injury I got in a bridge collapse.
Well, he's not a formal MD or anything, but he's really smart and read about leg reattachment a lot on the Web, so I'm sure that he'll do fine without any of those fancy degrees.
And I'm willing to cut the bridge designer some slack. I mean, it was only his second bridge, and the first one is still standing. I'm sure he'll get better in the future, and he was a *lot* cheaper to hire than all those engineers with their fancy civil engineering degrees.
This is a sport where World Cup finals are decided by penalty shots because nobody could score while playing the actual game. 2-0 is something like 97-0 in american football terms.
With a little practice you can work up to 175 wpm...Just imagine, being able to say ten words for each one your opponent utters! He'll never be able to come up with a counter argument before you completely devastate him with an astounding verbal barrage and move through seven topics before he gathers enough wits to reply to the first one. If he tries, just sneer and invoke the three-second rule.
While I know you're being funny, I bet you've never seen a real competitive debate at full "spread". This is exactly the tactic every decent debater uses. I was pretty crappy and I could easily sustain close to 300wpm for ten minutes. The really good ones can do 400. It is truly hypnotic.
You get used to it though. I could even take notes on a speaker at 300 wpm, keeping ten or so arguments tracked across 5 different speeches while pulling note cards to refute points, and again I never was better than ok at that. It's amazingly mentally taxing to do this- I'd walk out of a close debate barely able to speak.
If a 30+ hour game can be finished in less than 30 minutes, which category does it go in?
Hey- look at me. I just read War and Peace in 15 minutes! Well, ok, I read a one-paragraph synopsis of the ending of the book, but clearly it's not really a long story at all.
I know you're joking, but having both played Morrowind all the way through as well as read the speedrun explanation, are you counting the hundreds of hours needed to
Learn what you need to do to "win"
Learn the locations of a bunch of stuff (orcish armor in a crate) that is very hard to find
Learn where you can steal alchemist equipment
Learn about Creeper
Learn what ingredients make the potions you need
Learn where to get those ingredients
Learn where the primary artifacts you need to win are hidden
Learn what you actually need to do with Sunder and Keening to win.
Don't know about anyone else, but my brother-in-law just spent 7 hours standing in line at the Star Wars convention to get a special Darth Vader action figure. He's 30, a married college grad in the Army and thus not exactly a kid.
Perhaps it has something to do with getting back from a tour of Afganistan. I think his wife hopes it was.
How could you miss...
on
Iron Council
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· Score: 1
...Kiln People by David Brin? While not his best work it was a big seller.
Silly Norweigans! Bender's not a PC!
on
The Bender PC Case
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· Score: 4, Funny
Any true Futurama fan knows that Bender has a 6502 CPU. Just point the f-ray at his head to prove it.
Of course municipal WiFi is a bad idea. Verizon would lose me as a DSL customer. Silly me, I should be happy with my 100kpb/s (note small b) connection speed. After all, they just closed my trouble ticket a day after I reported the problem.
Time to call the helldesk again. You'd think after 5 calls in a month they'd get tired of me. I'm debating sending a check for $2 for service this month- I'm getting 1/15 the advertised speed, so I should only have to pay 1/15 of what I owe, right?
Nope, that was the British version, save for some multi-country specials. The American version had some posturing idiot called Rossi.
The British version also had Cathy, the ultimate geek dream girl. Not only both easy on the eyes and a talented singer, but the entire series was her idea. She dreamed it up after watching Apollo 13 with the bit where they had to make a filter housing out of junk laying around the capsule.
I remember the first time I saw this show. I was totally hooked. Nutty people, hosts who knew enough to ask interesting questions, and a whole pile of basic engineering in simple crayon animations. What a briliant idea. Then again, it was from Britain.
Then the american version appeared. Louder, noisier, with inane hosts and manufactured "conflict" between the teams where there used to be good natured competition. Less and less science, more and more "garage cam". Builds where clever engineering was forgotten in favorite of getting the best planted junk.
Now, it is no more. Instead, I can watch decorating show marathons. Or not- I haven't turned on TLC in months.
That amounts to 450,000 dollars just to keep this guy from spamming us.
And how much was he costing us? My small college just had to shell out for a spam blocking server because the load from the 60-70% of our email that was spam was killing our mail server. Then we had to have our network tech spend time installing it, configuring it and of course making sure it doesn't kill stuff like the dozens of mailing lists most faculty are on. And I'm not even counting the time people on campus have wasted dealing with spam mail.
We're a small place, and I'm sure spam is costing us five figures annually. I can't imagine what it costs a major ISP or college.
$50k a year to stuff this guy in PMITA prison is nothing. Speaking as a Virginia taxpayer, let's get 100 more and make it 5 million/year. After that perhaps spam will go away and we can stop wasting vastly more than that dealing with their crappy ads.
I've never been to India either, but I've got a Indian friend who studies rural development there.
Computers are actually a big win when they get one for a village. A huge problem in India is competing land rights. The only documentation for who owns what is probably buried on paper in an office 100 miles away, and it's quite possible the people who are interested can't get there (too poor) and couldn't read it if they did. A single low powered computer can keep track of these sorts of things- you only need one literate person and a crappy generator and you'll save endless hours of argument.
Phones too are huge- The Economist just had a number of articles devoted to the impact a mobile phone can have. Again, there are only one or two per village, rented out by the minute, but a farmer can find out how much a buyer is willing to pay without wasting a day walking there. The economic efficiency boosts can be huge.
Don't assume our model of a dozen gadgets per person. Not everybody needs a phone or computer. But every village does.
I actually did this last semester during IST103, a course that the entire first year student body had to take. (There's no local display in the lecture hall, so sometimes you have to crane your neck and I just wasn't looking.) It was before the start of the class, but there were probably 100 people there.
Worse, I'm a system admin so I have rights on many of the machines on campus.
I changed it the instant I got back to my office. Luckily we won't have wireless access in that hall.
Slashdot Mirror
FYI, I'm not an American, and the page about Cuban human rights abuses which I linked to is a European/international human rights group. So I don't think your generalization about other countries is particularly relevant.
Having lived in Canada for a while, it's certainly true there. Canadians don't see Cuba as any worse than dozens of other repressive countries, and better than many. (They wouldn't vacation there so often nor be their #1 trading partner otherwise)
Any comparison in terms of repressiveness between the two countries is largely silly, even despite the current overreaction to terrorism.
I'm not really trying to claim the US is as bad as Cuba. We're not. But it's nowhere as black and white as many Americans believe- our staggering imprisonment rate for quite trivial crimes should be a national shame. (And you're right- it's a racial issue. I'm part of a multiracial family. I can get away with things my kids will never be able to. See http://www.norml.org/images/state_arrests_2004/AR_ Page_69.gif)
I don't buy the pot smoker comparison, either: show me the pot smoker (not dealer) who is in jail for one to four years for mere possession of single-person quantities.
I can't get exact figures since nobody keeps them, but here's an attempt from http://www.mpp.org/archive/arrest94.html
- Marijuana possession felony convictions comprised "less than 1%" of the total of 893,630 felony convictions in state courts. Assume 0.5%, ~4,500 people in 1992
- 62% of those convicted of drug possession felonies were sentenced to incarceration (33% in state prisons and 29% in local jails) Ignore local jails, ~1500 people in state prison.
- Prison sentences are for long-term confinement (usually for over a year) in a state facility.
So a back-of-the-envelope calculation gives ~1500 people per year getting sentenced to more than a year in jail for simple posession.Someone from NORML could probably give better figures.
(The true irony of this whole discussion is that I don't smoke pot.)
First, there's an issue of degree. There are far more ordinary people in Cuban prisons, who would not be imprisoned in any free country.
Perhaps. They jail political dissidents. We jail pot smokers. Thus, the US has the highest imprisonment rate in the world. (Or very close- we don't know North Korea's) Cuba's not even in the top ten.
Second, I wasn't defending the US, I was pointing out that Cuba is still a very repressive place, and those who want to pretend that everything's cool and its problems should just be accepted with a wink are themselves collaborating in the repression of the Cuban people.
I'd be one of the last to defend Cuba- it's a wreck of a country due to a meglomanical dictator. The world will be a better place when Castro is worm food.
But other countries simply don't see Cuba with anywhere near the level of hatred in the US. They see us pointing fingers at Cuba's repressive practices while we're busy keeping people in legal limbo forever in our own tiny slice of Cuba.
If we had cleaner hands other countries might be more willing to listen to us about Cuba.
Summary: you can be arrested and detained for up to four years because the police think you appear dangerous and might commit a crime.
And what crime has Jose Padilla committed? He's been in a military jail for years, denied a lawyer because the powers that be in the US have declared him a terrorist, although they don't seem to want to actually charge him with anything.
Seems to me that we're more than happy to detain people too when we don't like them.
And before you dismiss me as some liberal loony, check that link again. It's not just liberals pissed about Bush trampling all over the Bill of Rights in the name of "keeping us safe from terror."
(In seriousness, when I was in grad school one of the groups at my school had borrowed a pure C-13 diamond for some calibration reason. They lost it for a while, causing much panic. I have no idea what it was worth, but I'm sure it was a fortune.)
Um, no. Some cars fail closed. I can tell you for certain that VW Vanagons fail open, and when telling people this story other folks tell me about cars they know that fail open.
Fail closed is an obvious safety measure, so I don't know why anyone would use otherwise, but the cable literally broke on the Vanagon, and the throttle maxed out. A temporary fix broke about 30 minutes later, with the same results.
It's all servo-driven, no linkage between the throttle and the gas pedal at all. If I had thought to check stuff like that I wouldn't have bought it.
And a cable is any better? I've been a car where the accelerator cable broke and left the throttle wide open. I suspect a servo might well be more robust than a cable.
Luckily it was a 70's era VM Vanagon camper. I think we went from 62 to 63 in the 5 minutes or so we spent playing with the accelerator pedal to see what the problem was.
Why? Copyright. Professors love to use copyrighted material, and they can under fair use within a course. (Course readers, photos, movies, etc) But you can't just throw it up on that thar Interweb thingie without talking to the folks who own the copyright.
OCW has a team of people that do nothing other than copyright clearance. One architecture course had 900-odd photos that were the core of the course. Every single one was copyrighted, and there were a huge number of different owners. The course wasn't on OCW simply because they hadn't managed to get everyone to sign off.
They're selling L3v!tra and C !ali5
Totally different stuff
Yes, there are better conversion utilities for BB and WebCT. We don't care- we didn't move from either and have no plans to go there. Sakai migration might be a problem if we do move there, but I'm sure I can whip something up. Retraining will suck though.
I'm a sunk cost-it was part of my unofficial job description to get *something* up and running. I like to program, so I was able to do it. I'm more expensive than a Blackboard support tech anyway for a variety of reasons.
Dokeos has fewer user configuration options. On the other hand, I've integrated it with our uPortal, SCT Powercampus student information system, library e-reserve system and others. Most of these would have been high-cost options for Blackboard, some wouldn't have even been possible. (I get rid of BB and WebCT salespeople by asking about Powercampus integration details. They go away and never come back.)
Security in BB is very questionable, and they sue people who report security flaws to prevent them talking about them. The Dokeos folks are quite open when they find problems.
The basic reasons we went with Dokeos? We needed something, we had a budget crunch and BB and WebCT had just announced huge price increases. Faculty were ambivalent at best and hostile at worst to a CMS. Most of the high end features of BB and WebCT were just not needed, but integration into an unusual campus configuration was.
Dokeos did enough and did it for close to $0 up front cost. I sold this as a 3-year project. We just finished year two. I got the poll results from the faculty yesterday- 82% of faculty rate the system as excellent or good, just 4% as poor.
For us, this was an optimal solution-it's an Open Source success story. If I'd been at Penn State, I would have been (rightfully) fired, but I'm not and my job is quite secure.
- Reduced dependence on software vendors. Somewhat true. I'm still locked in to the product- switching will be an enormous pain, with lots of conversion costs no matter if we're proprietary or Open Source. Switching would actually be easier with a commercial product- conduits exist for Blackboard to WebCT and back. Nothing of the sort exists for Dokeos and Sakai, the project we'd most likely move to. Plus, I've also had to deal with a fork where the lead developer took his ball and went home. That was a little tense.
- Lower total cost of ownership. Almost certainly untrue. Yes, Blackboard would rape us on fees. But you can hire Blackboard training and support people cheap. Dokeos realistically requires a programmer to support. Luckily I like to program, but my job description when I was hired never mentioned that. (I'm rewriting it this week)
- Easier to customize Very dependent on product. The user interface of Dokeos is vastly less configurable than Blackboard. On the flip side, since I can tweak code I have it firmly embedded into half a dozen systems here.
- Higher level of security Very, very doubtful, again with a few exceptions. Back in the days I installed Claroline (Dokeos' parent) it required register_globals=on. There have been other places where the developers have found SQL and code injection points.
I'm a big advocate for Open Source, but those people checking "reduced dependence on software vendors" probably haven't had a serious fork in a project a year after rolling it out to 1000 users.Well, he's not a formal MD or anything, but he's really smart and read about leg reattachment a lot on the Web, so I'm sure that he'll do fine without any of those fancy degrees.
And I'm willing to cut the bridge designer some slack. I mean, it was only his second bridge, and the first one is still standing. I'm sure he'll get better in the future, and he was a *lot* cheaper to hire than all those engineers with their fancy civil engineering degrees.
This is a sport where World Cup finals are decided by penalty shots because nobody could score while playing the actual game. 2-0 is something like 97-0 in american football terms.
While I know you're being funny, I bet you've never seen a real competitive debate at full "spread". This is exactly the tactic every decent debater uses. I was pretty crappy and I could easily sustain close to 300wpm for ten minutes. The really good ones can do 400. It is truly hypnotic.
You get used to it though. I could even take notes on a speaker at 300 wpm, keeping ten or so arguments tracked across 5 different speeches while pulling note cards to refute points, and again I never was better than ok at that. It's amazingly mentally taxing to do this- I'd walk out of a close debate barely able to speak.
If a 30+ hour game can be finished in less than 30 minutes, which category does it go in?
Hey- look at me. I just read War and Peace in 15 minutes! Well, ok, I read a one-paragraph synopsis of the ending of the book, but clearly it's not really a long story at all.
I know you're joking, but having both played Morrowind all the way through as well as read the speedrun explanation, are you counting the hundreds of hours needed to
- Learn what you need to do to "win"
- Learn the locations of a bunch of stuff (orcish armor in a crate) that is very hard to find
- Learn where you can steal alchemist equipment
- Learn about Creeper
- Learn what ingredients make the potions you need
- Learn where to get those ingredients
- Learn where the primary artifacts you need to win are hidden
- Learn what you actually need to do with Sunder and Keening to win.
Still, I'm amazed someone managed it that fast.Don't know about anyone else, but my brother-in-law just spent 7 hours standing in line at the Star Wars convention to get a special Darth Vader action figure. He's 30, a married college grad in the Army and thus not exactly a kid.
Perhaps it has something to do with getting back from a tour of Afganistan. I think his wife hopes it was.
...Kiln People by David Brin? While not his best work it was a big seller.
Any true Futurama fan knows that Bender has a 6502 CPU. Just point the f-ray at his head to prove it.
Time to call the helldesk again. You'd think after 5 calls in a month they'd get tired of me. I'm debating sending a check for $2 for service this month- I'm getting 1/15 the advertised speed, so I should only have to pay 1/15 of what I owe, right?
Imagine the conversation with your energy supplier, a slightly more critical need but...
You do know that high electricity usage is one sign cops use when looking for indoor marijuana growing operations, right?
Sure they won't cut off your power. They'll just kick your door down.
The British version also had Cathy, the ultimate geek dream girl. Not only both easy on the eyes and a talented singer, but the entire series was her idea. She dreamed it up after watching Apollo 13 with the bit where they had to make a filter housing out of junk laying around the capsule.
Then the american version appeared. Louder, noisier, with inane hosts and manufactured "conflict" between the teams where there used to be good natured competition. Less and less science, more and more "garage cam". Builds where clever engineering was forgotten in favorite of getting the best planted junk.
Now, it is no more. Instead, I can watch decorating show marathons. Or not- I haven't turned on TLC in months.
Ummm, yeah. I'm sure that nobody thinks worse of the Oakland Raiders because of the "Raider Nation". Nobody at all.
Of course I'm speaking as a Philadelphia Eagles fan here, and before you say anything, he was a lousy Santa Claus. He deserved to be booed.
And how much was he costing us? My small college just had to shell out for a spam blocking server because the load from the 60-70% of our email that was spam was killing our mail server. Then we had to have our network tech spend time installing it, configuring it and of course making sure it doesn't kill stuff like the dozens of mailing lists most faculty are on. And I'm not even counting the time people on campus have wasted dealing with spam mail.
We're a small place, and I'm sure spam is costing us five figures annually. I can't imagine what it costs a major ISP or college.
$50k a year to stuff this guy in PMITA prison is nothing. Speaking as a Virginia taxpayer, let's get 100 more and make it 5 million/year. After that perhaps spam will go away and we can stop wasting vastly more than that dealing with their crappy ads.
Computers are actually a big win when they get one for a village. A huge problem in India is competing land rights. The only documentation for who owns what is probably buried on paper in an office 100 miles away, and it's quite possible the people who are interested can't get there (too poor) and couldn't read it if they did. A single low powered computer can keep track of these sorts of things- you only need one literate person and a crappy generator and you'll save endless hours of argument.
Phones too are huge- The Economist just had a number of articles devoted to the impact a mobile phone can have. Again, there are only one or two per village, rented out by the minute, but a farmer can find out how much a buyer is willing to pay without wasting a day walking there. The economic efficiency boosts can be huge.
Don't assume our model of a dozen gadgets per person. Not everybody needs a phone or computer. But every village does.
Worse, I'm a system admin so I have rights on many of the machines on campus.
I changed it the instant I got back to my office. Luckily we won't have wireless access in that hall.