Unless the cause of the lack of food is something acute (a drought, a short-term political unrest), a food drop will be useless; they'll be hungry again a few days later. They need something that will changer their circumstances - they need tools. Knowledge is the most powerful tool. Of course, dropping some well-crafted farm implements, crop seeds, solar stills, and photovoltaic-powered water pumps (and depending on the circumstances, some small arms) along with the web terminals wouldn't hurt - but without the information to use these tools effectively, they're useless.
It's the old saw about give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime.
Once others with similar boxes found out you were doing well (because you can follow instrustions on basic survival and medical care, and they are lazy and want to eat to fruits of your labor)
If they are lazy, they will find it easier to follow the instructions on survival/medical care/etcetera themselves rather tham steal what I've build based on the instructions - because I've also been reading up on martial arts and improvised weapons. B-)
(I'm on two karate mailing lists, and the net has helped my training a lot. I just had a godan (fifth-degree black belt) fellow from South Africa, who I'd never met except over the net, stay at my place and teach at my dojo over the weekend. He's touring the Americas and keeping in touch with everyone - the folks at home and his hosts here - via e-mail.)
Woody Guthrie used to have this slogan written on his guitar: "This Machine Kills Fascists". Music has always been a strong tool for communication, for organizing and inspiring people. The escaped slave knew to "Follow the Drinking Gourd" north to freedom. The civil rights marchers chanted "We Shall Overcome". Soldiers sing their battle hymns and their marching cadences.
If we - the developers of technology - do our job, I think that slogan could well be written on computers.
It's up to you and me. Do you want to build machines that kill fascism, or do you want to build Big Brother?
Hmm, I read it completely differently! It didn't make me feel guilty for using technology, it prompted me to think (not for the first time) if and how technology could be used to help with these deep problems.
It is entirely possible that is can't, and that it's hubris to think that technology can really improve the human condition; but in some instances (like the last question in the test) circumstances are so bad it would be really hard for us to make them worse. So with your indulgence, I will speculate...
What could a solar-powered, wireless, tap-proof web terminal do for that oppressed peasant in North Korea? Perhaps the first and most important thing is to help him understand that there is another way of life. People who have been beaten down all their lives come to accept it; the first step towards radical change is to understand that change is possible.
Now, while one person may be a leader and inspire change, it takes many people to make that change happen. That web terminal would let our peasant organize and coordinate not only with others in his own country, but with action groups all over the world. It would be a lot harder for the U.S. Congress to ignore the problems of the third world poor if they were talking to us, one-to-one, over the net.
Our peasant needs to make the most of his meager resources. How can I build a warmer, drier hut? How can I dig a better well? How can I irrigate my fields? How can I take care of my sick kids when there's no doctor in a hundred miles? There might not be a lot of web pages dedicated to these topics now, but if the "third world" gets online you can bet they'll be tops.
Finally, what happens when the time comes for direct action? Whether you need the writings of Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi, or plans for building bombs and blowing up government facilities, the web has it.
First, Americans did not kill millions of Native peoples. Smallpox did that
Dislocation and concentration of the native population was a great contributor to the spread of disease, and there were incidents of deliberate infection by contaminated blankets, etcetera.
Of course, that's just on top of all the American Indians who will killed by more traditional means.
None of which is meant to excuse any actions of the Chinese government, which currently has a much worse human rights record than the USA. But the USA can and should be doing much better - for starters, our foreign policy is often abysmal on human rights issues, we have the largest prison population (real number and per capita) in the world, and we are just about the only developed nation where the government claims the right to murder its own citizens.
I don't worry too much about using only an id/password combination on my bank account, since an attacker is limited in the damage they could do. Sending a check from my account takes a few days to clear, so there's a good chance I'd catch it before any damage was done - and writing a check to yourself from my account seems like a pretty good way to get caught, no? However, one could still do mischief by sending a check from my account to some third party (a contribution to the KKK, for example), and an intruder could get my credit card number from my online bank account. But the same risks apply if you got hold of my physical checkbook.
I'd be much more worried about medical records. (At least in general principal; there is, at the moment, nothing too terribly embarassing in them.)
Doesn't the HTTP 1.1 spec allow for some sort of challenge-response authentication? I think that would be significantly more secure than a simple password scheme. Mandating some sort of smartcard on the doctor's side would also be a good idea, but might be difficult to implement.
When I see some new outrageous effort to censor the net, I know the EFF (which I recently joined) will be leading the fight against it.
When I hear about some new attempt to force the church into the state, or to decrease protections against arbitrary search and seizure, I know the ACLU (of which I am a card-carrying member) will coordinate efforts against it.
There is widespread agreement that software patents are evil. But who's binding and guiding the outrage? The only name that keeps coming up is the LPF, but there doesn't seem to be much more there than a name - I can't even join or send money through their web site (http://lpf.ai.mit.edu).
Don't look at me - I'll give money, and write letters, but my organizing and people skills are zero. Maybe that's the problem, the old canard about how organizing geeks is like herding cats.
but SOMEONE PLEASE REPLY!: What does the "No Score +1 Bonus" option do
If a user has a bit of karma (I think it's 25 or 30 points) their posts default to a value of 2 instead of the usual 1 for logged in users. My karma is, bizarrely enough, high enough for this to happen (look at some of my other posts and you'll see that they're mostly at 2); but for this post I set the "No Score +1 Bonus", since it's offtopic.
You seem to have forgotten that Microsoft is private property.
No. Microsoft is a corporation, an artificial creation of a state government. (Washington? Or did they do the sleazy incorporate-where-the-laws-are-lax thing?)
Part of me would like to see the state in question just revoke MS's corporate charter, because it would overnight end the corporate plutocracy in the US. (It would also cause all hell to break loose, which is fun to watch so long as you're not in the middle of it.) Unfortunately, this "corporate death penalty" has been almost unused for the past hundred years.
But who are you to deny me the right to change my environemt to suit my needs?
Outside of the privacy of your own home, you can not change your environment without changing mine as well. (And even in your home, there are restrictions - for instance, burning toxic waste in your fireplace does affect your neighbors.)
If I recall my English lit classes, the tragic hero has some sort of tragic flaw. Often it's hubris (Macbeth's belief in his right to rule and his invulnerability), or ignorance (a simple DNA test could have saved Oedipus so much trouble).
Capek's R.U.R. might be the best literary example of techno-tragedy; humanity's downfall is a combination of hubris (believing it can create life better than God or Nature) and ignorance of the consequences of it's invention.
Maybe that's what makes for techno-tragedy - pride made dangerous by ignorance. "Look!" says Man "I have invented refrigeration! Food and medicinces can be preserved! Hot buildings can be made comfortable! Isn't this wonderful!" And it is wonderful - but meanwhile, unknown to him, his refrigerant is eating away the ozone layer that shields him from ultraviolet rays.
Maybe it's technophile hubris to think that the human condition can be fundamentally improved by technology - "we cannot get grace from gadgets," as someone once put it. But on the other hand, we are now developing the technologies that can change what it is to be human - genetic engineering, bio- and nano-tech, cybernetics, things that will not lead to incremental change in the human condition but quite possibly to the end of humanity as we know it.
Maybe we'll just destroy ourselves; but maybe we'll just break out of the chyrsalis and become something more than what we are. Remember that birth to the butterfly looks like death to the catepillar.
The end of our story with technology isn't written yet - it remains to be seen whether it is tragedy, comedy, or romance.
You don't have to go ruining artic environments, either. There's _lots_ of room to go under, just bury it in the proper geology.
Yeah, I like the idea from Brin's Earthclan books, where environmentally-aware cultures bury their trash in subduction zones - recycling via plate tectonics.
When the cost goes up, so will the cost of disposable products.
Where do you live, that the cost of disposal is included in the cost of a product? Where I am, trash and recyclables pickup is funded by property taxes and is completely unrelated to how much I throw out. How would you include disposal costs in the purchase price? I guess it would have to be a local sales tax, since the cost of disposal could vary widely from place to place.
Allow posts without any moderation. A truly free forum will attract users in droves
You are allowed to post with no moderation. It's only when we read that articles are selected based on our preferences. If you want to read a completely "free" forum, set your preferences to a threshold of -1. You'll get the "F1R5T P05T!" lusers, the outright trolls and flames, the whole shebang. Or hey, you can always go back to USENET, there might be a few unmoderated groups that are still worth reading - but I can't think of any offhand.
I've been on the Net for a decade, and was BBSing for a few years before that. This is one of the best discussion forums I've been on since The September That Never Ended; I attribute this largely to/.'s advisory distributed moderation system.
Conflicts that the US did not "win": The War of 1812...
The British stopped impressing American sailors, which was what the war was about. While the British burned parts of DC, they didn't get to the shipyards of Baltimore (for which, as a patron of Fells' Point bars, I am grateful); it was, in fact, the Battle of Baltimore that inspired Francis Scott Key to write "The Star-Spangled Banner."
The U.S. sucessfully asserted its national sovereignity, which I think has to count as victory.
Whadda ya say, folks, was the above spew: 1) written by someone who neglected to get his thorazine prescription refilled, or 2) generated by some bizzare flame generator ("obstreperous huns"? "obstinate misoneism enthusiasts"? C'mon...)
Earlier in the year I had requested that Microsoft not send email address in question. It took several tries before the email (newswire messages) finally stopped. Months later Microsoft's Y2K message arrived.
This appears to violate Microsoft's stated privacy policy , specifically principle #2 - Consent:...
IANAL, but I have to wonder if this isn't actionable in some way. Sounds like it would be breach of contract, or false advertising.
While it wouldn't be worthwhile for an individual to sue, maybe class-action suits against sites that violate their own privacy statements would serve to inject some cluefulness into these corporate behemoths.
Yes, it would be good to put more effort into Mozilla. I do hearby promise that when my new (well, used 266-K6, but it's newer than my current P-90) box comes and I get Linux up on it, I will put Mozilla on it and at least help with testing.
But, if web designers are stupid enough to design pages that only render in one browser, or even worse require plug-ins, I'm not sure that Mozilla will help.
We need to keep reminding content providers that there are people using other browsers than IE on Win - there's Opera, Netscape, Mozilla and Lynx being run on Macs, BeOS boxes, and various flavors of Unix, as well as the coming PDAs with browsing capabilities. Forty lashes with a cat5 cable for any web author who depends on proprietary extensions - if you want to say something, why in the world would you restrict who can hear it??
Hopefully, the accessibility lawsuit against AOL will help inspire more broswer neutral, universally accessible web site design.
Re:Welcome to RealWorld(tm)
on
NetSlaves
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· Score: 2
"What is it--10% of our kids are living without enough to eat?"
No, actually. According to USDA figure less than 1 percent of children ever miss even a single meal in a given year due to lack of food.
The two are not exclusive - it's quite possible (although I am not stating that it is the case) to get three meals a day and still be undernourished, if the meals are small and nutritionally poor.
Of course, a lot of middle-class kids are malnourished; not from lack of food but from too much junk. But that's another issue.
In fact defending everyone's freedom BUT the freedom of developers to charge for the work they have undertaken,
Nonsense. Nothing about the GPL prevents a software developer from charging money to create new programs, or to perform ports or fixes of existing ones. In fact, there are two organizations, SourceXchange and CoSource, set up to allow developers to charge for creating free software. I think the CoSource model works better for new software, while the SourceXchange one will do well for ports to new hardware or for integration.
why does Stallman (arguably the foremost expert on the meaning of the GPL) say that he cannot prevent someone from releasing software that uses his code?
He can prevent them from releasing it. He cannot make them release it under the GPL, because they have the options of rewriting the GPL'd portion, or not releasing at all.
Actually, I think 2112 retold for the open source/free software movement would be more like:
We've taken care of everything Spreadsheets you run, networks you ping The software that gives pleasure to your mind Oh what a pro-prietary world Let the source code be concealed Hold the user licence's high in hand!
We are the priests Of the Temples of Windows (maybe "Redmond" scans better?) Our bloated software Fills up all your RAM...
Then Linus and/or RMS enter, singing:
Look into our programs See what they can do! There's source code here, it's as free as air Hackers, this will intrigue you!
the spirit of my post, which is: what's wrong with "free everything"?
Nothing. But it doesn't exist. That's the point of my post. Now we're back where we started.
And that is the point, food in hungry peoples mouths. Hopefully it will be books & education next. Do you see any problems with this? How could you have problems with this?
My problem with this is that it would be much more efficient for us to give money directly to hungry people than to pay for various products an increased price, which goes to advertising budgets, a tiny portion of which goes to feed the hungry.
The advertisers aren't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts; if they were, they'd just send the money and be done with it without making you look at ads. They're doing this because they believe that getting you to look at their ads will get you to buy their stuff. And so we drive the culture of consumption which leads to the economic injustice that makes people poor and hungry in the first place.
Also, how much is your time worth? How much time does it take you to click on THS? Sending ten bucks to charity each year might actually be cheaper, as well as getting more results. To paraphrase some/.er's.sig, "Advertising-supported activities are only free if your time has no value."
(And yes, I do give directly to charity, and also to persons of my direct acquaintance who are in need.)
Slashdot Mirror
It's the old saw about give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime.
(I'm on two karate mailing lists, and the net has helped my training a lot. I just had a godan (fifth-degree black belt) fellow from South Africa, who I'd never met except over the net, stay at my place and teach at my dojo over the weekend. He's touring the Americas and keeping in touch with everyone - the folks at home and his hosts here - via e-mail.)
Woody Guthrie used to have this slogan written on his guitar: "This Machine Kills Fascists". Music has always been a strong tool for communication, for organizing and inspiring people. The escaped slave knew to "Follow the Drinking Gourd" north to freedom. The civil rights marchers chanted "We Shall Overcome". Soldiers sing their battle hymns and their marching cadences.
If we - the developers of technology - do our job, I think that slogan could well be written on computers.
It's up to you and me. Do you want to build machines that kill fascism, or do you want to build Big Brother?
It is entirely possible that is can't, and that it's hubris to think that technology can really improve the human condition; but in some instances (like the last question in the test) circumstances are so bad it would be really hard for us to make them worse. So with your indulgence, I will speculate...
What could a solar-powered, wireless, tap-proof web terminal do for that oppressed peasant in North Korea? Perhaps the first and most important thing is to help him understand that there is another way of life. People who have been beaten down all their lives come to accept it; the first step towards radical change is to understand that change is possible.
Now, while one person may be a leader and inspire change, it takes many people to make that change happen. That web terminal would let our peasant organize and coordinate not only with others in his own country, but with action groups all over the world. It would be a lot harder for the U.S. Congress to ignore the problems of the third world poor if they were talking to us, one-to-one, over the net.
Our peasant needs to make the most of his meager resources. How can I build a warmer, drier hut? How can I dig a better well? How can I irrigate my fields? How can I take care of my sick kids when there's no doctor in a hundred miles? There might not be a lot of web pages dedicated to these topics now, but if the "third world" gets online you can bet they'll be tops.
Finally, what happens when the time comes for direct action? Whether you need the writings of Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi, or plans for building bombs and blowing up government facilities, the web has it.
Of course, that's just on top of all the American Indians who will killed by more traditional means.
None of which is meant to excuse any actions of the Chinese government, which currently has a much worse human rights record than the USA. But the USA can and should be doing much better - for starters, our foreign policy is often abysmal on human rights issues, we have the largest prison population (real number and per capita) in the world, and we are just about the only developed nation where the government claims the right to murder its own citizens.
I'd be much more worried about medical records. (At least in general principal; there is, at the moment, nothing too terribly embarassing in them.)
Doesn't the HTTP 1.1 spec allow for some sort of challenge-response authentication? I think that would be significantly more secure than a simple password scheme. Mandating some sort of smartcard on the doctor's side would also be a good idea, but might be difficult to implement.
When I hear about some new attempt to force the church into the state, or to decrease protections against arbitrary search and seizure, I know the ACLU (of which I am a card-carrying member) will coordinate efforts against it.
There is widespread agreement that software patents are evil. But who's binding and guiding the outrage? The only name that keeps coming up is the LPF, but there doesn't seem to be much more there than a name - I can't even join or send money through their web site (http://lpf.ai.mit.edu).
Don't look at me - I'll give money, and write letters, but my organizing and people skills are zero. Maybe that's the problem, the old canard about how organizing geeks is like herding cats.
Part of me would like to see the state in question just revoke MS's corporate charter, because it would overnight end the corporate plutocracy in the US. (It would also cause all hell to break loose, which is fun to watch so long as you're not in the middle of it.) Unfortunately, this "corporate death penalty" has been almost unused for the past hundred years.
If I recall my English lit classes, the tragic hero has some sort of tragic flaw. Often it's hubris (Macbeth's belief in his right to rule and his invulnerability), or ignorance (a simple DNA test could have saved Oedipus so much trouble).
Capek's R.U.R. might be the best literary example of techno-tragedy; humanity's downfall is a combination of hubris (believing it can create life better than God or Nature) and ignorance of the consequences of it's invention.
Maybe that's what makes for techno-tragedy - pride made dangerous by ignorance. "Look!" says Man "I have invented refrigeration! Food and medicinces can be preserved! Hot buildings can be made comfortable! Isn't this wonderful!" And it is wonderful - but meanwhile, unknown to him, his refrigerant is eating away the ozone layer that shields him from ultraviolet rays.
Maybe it's technophile hubris to think that the human condition can be fundamentally improved by technology - "we cannot get grace from gadgets," as someone once put it. But on the other hand, we are now developing the technologies that can change what it is to be human - genetic engineering, bio- and nano-tech, cybernetics, things that will not lead to incremental change in the human condition but quite possibly to the end of humanity as we know it.
Maybe we'll just destroy ourselves; but maybe we'll just break out of the chyrsalis and become something more than what we are. Remember that birth to the butterfly looks like death to the catepillar.
The end of our story with technology isn't written yet - it remains to be seen whether it is tragedy, comedy, or romance.
You are allowed to post with no moderation. It's only when we read that articles are selected based on our preferences. If you want to read a completely "free" forum, set your preferences to a threshold of -1. You'll get the "F1R5T P05T!" lusers, the outright trolls and flames, the whole shebang. Or hey, you can always go back to USENET, there might be a few unmoderated groups that are still worth reading - but I can't think of any offhand.
I've been on the Net for a decade, and was BBSing for a few years before that. This is one of the best discussion forums I've been on since The September That Never Ended; I attribute this largely to /.'s advisory distributed moderation system.
The U.S. sucessfully asserted its national sovereignity, which I think has to count as victory.
Whadda ya say, folks, was the above spew: 1) written by someone who neglected to get his thorazine prescription refilled, or 2) generated by some bizzare flame generator ("obstreperous huns"? "obstinate misoneism enthusiasts"? C'mon...)
While it wouldn't be worthwhile for an individual to sue, maybe class-action suits against sites that violate their own privacy statements would serve to inject some cluefulness into these corporate behemoths.
But, if web designers are stupid enough to design pages that only render in one browser, or even worse require plug-ins, I'm not sure that Mozilla will help.
We need to keep reminding content providers that there are people using other browsers than IE on Win - there's Opera, Netscape, Mozilla and Lynx being run on Macs, BeOS boxes, and various flavors of Unix, as well as the coming PDAs with browsing capabilities. Forty lashes with a cat5 cable for any web author who depends on proprietary extensions - if you want to say something, why in the world would you restrict who can hear it??
Hopefully, the accessibility lawsuit against AOL will help inspire more broswer neutral, universally accessible web site design.
Of course, a lot of middle-class kids are malnourished; not from lack of food but from too much junk. But that's another issue.
We've taken care of everything
Spreadsheets you run, networks you ping
The software that gives pleasure to your mind
Oh what a pro-prietary world
Let the source code be concealed
Hold the user licence's high in hand!
We are the priests
Of the Temples of Windows (maybe "Redmond" scans better?)
Our bloated software
Fills up all your RAM...
Then Linus and/or RMS enter, singing:
Look into our programs
See what they can do!
There's source code here, it's as free as air
Hackers, this will intrigue you!
And so on...
The advertisers aren't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts; if they were, they'd just send the money and be done with it without making you look at ads. They're doing this because they believe that getting you to look at their ads will get you to buy their stuff. And so we drive the culture of consumption which leads to the economic injustice that makes people poor and hungry in the first place.
Also, how much is your time worth? How much time does it take you to click on THS? Sending ten bucks to charity each year might actually be cheaper, as well as getting more results. To paraphrase some /.er's .sig, "Advertising-supported activities are only free if your time has no value."
(And yes, I do give directly to charity, and also to persons of my direct acquaintance who are in need.)