whilst i find the practices of apple absolutely deplorable - forcing people to sign up for an ID in order to use hardware products that they have paid for, taking so much information that even *banks* won't work with them - bizarrely the amount of money that people pay them is sufficient for apple to spend considerable resources on high-quality components and design.
i have bought a stack of laptops in the past (and always installed Debian on them - see http://lkcl.net/reports/) and have found them to be okay, but always within 2 to 3 years they are showing their age or in some cases completely falling apart. the 2nd Acer TravelMate C112 i bought i actually wore a hole through the left shift key with my fingernail after 2 years of use. hard drives died, screen backlights failed, an HP laptop had such bad design on the power socket that it shorted out one day and almost caught fire. i had to scramble for a good few seconds to pull the battery out, smoke pouring out of the machine as the PMICs glowed.
about 6 years ago my partner had the opportunity to buy both an 18in and a 24in iMac at discounted prices. i immediately installed Debian on it: it took 4 days because grub2-efi was highly undocumented and experimental at the time. so i had a huge 1920x1200 24in screen (which over the next few years actually damaged my eyes because i was too close: my eyesight is now "prism" - i've documented this here on slashdot in the past), a lovely dual-core XEON, 2gb of RAM and it was *quiet*. there is a huge heatsink in the back, and the design uses passive cooling (vertical air convection).
awesome... except not very portable. and no spying or registration of confidential data with some arbitrary company that you *KNOW* is providing your details to the NSA, otherwise there's this conversation which begins "y'know it's *real* hard to get that export license for your products, if you know what i mean, mr CEO".
so, when i moved to holland i had to leave the 24in iMac behind - apart from anything, 2gb of RAM was just not enough. i leave firefox open for 4-7 days (basically until it crashes), opening over 150 sometimes even as many as 250 tabs in a single window. it gets to about 4gb of RAM and starts to become a problem: that's when i kill it. on the iMac, it was consuming most of the resident RAM. i compile programs: 2gb of RAM is barely enough for the linker phase of applications like webkit (which requires 1.6gb of RESIDENT memory in order to complete within a reasonable amount of time). i run VMs with OSes for study.
so i was used to the 1900x1200 screen now, where i could get *five* xterms across a single window. i run fvwm2 with a 6x4 virtual screen, and run over 30 xterms in different places, 3 different web browsers; as i am now developing hardware i run CAD programs in one fvwm2 virtual screen, PDFs in the ones next to it, i run Blender in one virtual screen, OpenSCAD in another, firefox in another, chromium in yet another, then i have to view and manage client machines so i use rdesktop to connect to those (move over to a free virtual window area to do it) - the list goes on and on.
so i figured, "hmmm laptop... but with good screen. must have lots of RAM too, minimum 8gb, must have decent processor". i then began investigating, and found the Lenovo Ideapad. great! let's buy it!.... except their web site crashed. so i then - reluctantly - began investigating iMac laptops. 2560x1600 LCD, 8gb of RAM, dual-core dual-threaded processor: $USD 1500 and *in the UK*, with a U.S. keyboard so nobody was buying it. researched it, saw the success reports of people installing debian on it, knew it could be done: sold, instantly.
so now i am extremely happy with this machine - not with apple themselves - but with the hardware that i have. it's light, it's fast, it's a sturdy aluminum case, the fan only comes on if i swish large OpenSCAD models around in 3D (or if firefox gets overbloated as usual).
thank you - genuinely - for making your feelings known so clearly. it is not often that these kinds of words get through on slashdot: so often they are treated as "troll" or "flaimbait", but your words are genuine and from the heart, and everyone can see that plainly.
i've said this often enough, but it is worth repeating: i am not a U.S. citizen but i know that where the U.S. leads, everyone else follows. so it matters *a lot* that the U.S. remain a stable country and a shining example for the rest of the world. the USA uses something like 25% of the world's resources and is only 1/8th the world's population: obviously not everyone can follow *that* example or we would need more Earths to live on!
the only thing i can suggest is that if you are truly a patriot, read the U.S. Constitution again. it was in the film "National Treasure" that that incredibly critical section first came to my attention - the one about "every citizen having the absolute duty to uphold it" and even to *overthrow* the government if it becomes tyrannical.
so i'm absolutely serious: think hard about that. i don't think it's quite come to it yet: they're being quite subtle about it as well as, in some ways, being really quite self-delusional in the genuine belief that they are doing the right thing, and that in itself is part of the problem. these are *rational people* in power, but they are justifying some pretty borderline decisions.
i guess what i'm really saying is: talk to other people about this. get a consensus. find out if other people believe that your government has gone too far, to the point of being tyrannical. if other people don't believe that's the case, then that's fine too. but if they do, then, collectively, you know what to do.
didn't we just see a report from the NSA that the people who bombed the World Trade Centre didn't use encryption but instead used obfuscation - sending their messages to each other with subjects that would *deliberately* trigger SPAM filters, such as "Buy Viagra Online"?
i realise several people have said it already, but i wanted to add that i bought a macbook pro with the 2560x1600 LCD, dual core with 8gb of RAM and it wasn't until loadavg went above 4.0 for over a minute that i even realised that it had a fan at all. it's an aluminium case (watch the edges: they are actually quite sharp).
now, people may say they are expensive but i managed to get hold of one that had been imported into the UK, and had a US keyboard, it was only $USD 1500 where all the ones with UK keyboards were $USD 2,000. given the resolution of the screen and the amount of RAM i considered it to be a serious major bargain and a long-term investment: i anticipate running this machine for at least 5 years.
now, the only down-side is that it has a 256gbyte SSD, which these days is quite small. it does however have USB3 so can use external ultra-fast USB3 SATA drives. but that's not the main down-side: the _real_ problem is that in the EU, power is not earthed properly. so when you plug the PSU in, there is considerable EMI which can actually give you an electric shock if you happen for example to put your foot on a metal radiator.
checking in/var/log/syslog it was *swamped* with SATA resets, so much so that i actually had to move to a tmpfs for/var/log and restart all services so that they used it (there are better ways to do this). the debian page for macbook pros with SSDs describes a workaround which carries out a reset on the SATA device (i forget what it is) but i found that this was *nowhere near* adequate, even if added to a cron job and run every single minute. the problem was of course compounded by the fact that each SATA reset was accompanied by a syslog message which, of course, resulted in a write, which, of course, went wrong, causing another reset. by moving/var/log to a tmpfs i broke the loop, and the resets only occur every 5 to 30 seconds, which i can live with.
it's actually good that i'm running debian because if this still had a proprietary OS on it there would be nothing i could have done about the problem.
anyway, _despite_ this, i would *still* recommend 100% getting a macbook pro [and replacing its OS]. the screen is awesome: i left xterm at its default font size, very quickly got used to the tiny characters, and - get this: i can fit *TEN* 80x51 xterms on one screen! i think that's absolutely hilarious, and for programming it's absolutely amazing. currently i have 4 xterms *on the same screen* with a firefox window that's at 1300 x 1200 pixels! i could make it more but i find that web pages don't really properly stretch beyond that as they're usually designed for around 1200 pixels wide at the most, these days.
so, yeah - get macbook pros but please for goodness sake dump the OS.
Our lead emissions have left a trace in ice cores. As has our industrial production of CO2. We've got radar-trackable space junk in graveyard orbit that isn't going to go anywhere for millions of years. Our nuclear tests have left detectable traces of long-lived isotopes in ice cores too. If there had been any advanced industrial civilisation in the last hundred thousand years, we'd have found it.
where on earth did you get the impression that india was an advanced industrial civilisation thousands of years ago? have you read any of the legends - the mahabarata and so on? it was *backwards*! only the people in power had the kinds of unlimited wealth similar to governments and large corporations of today. and - as now - they keep things incredibly secret. the advantage that they had then over today is the total lack of communication. the people in power at the time were so far removed in terms of wealth and knowledge and resources that they were commonly viewed - quite literally - as living gods.
so no, there *was* no advanced industrial civilisation in india. there were a few incredibly wealthy powerful people with access to machines, scared of letting the knowledge out of their hands of how those machines worked in case their enemies got hold of them (a situation not dissimilar to today...) and then there was everyone else, eking out medieval-style subsistence existence.
there's a story on the internet that someone in india, during victorian times, actually recreated one of these machines, directly from the instructions. when the british heard about it they had it destroyed.
And why hasn't anyone built any of these things since? Why doesn't any one build these now? If it were a matter of following instructions and someone did it on their own at one point a century or so ago, then it should be straightforward to crank out a prototype now.
thinking that through, there could be a series of compounded reasons why not, and we can summarise at the end with an analogy.
firstly, the people who _did_ make these flying machines were the ruling class of india at the time. they had reputations as "living gods" (how if they could quotes fly quotes would the ordinary person believe otherwise?). in other words, they were incredibly wealthy. so they had access to thousands or tens of thousands of workers if they needed them, to go out and find the metals and other resources.
secondly, fast-forwarding to our "modern" times, we have some texts - written in the context of science at the time - which are in sanskrit, and the context is lost. it takes a *lot* of research to work out the missing information that the original authors would have known. the classic funny story here is that the bible was written in hebrew and was translated to greek by someone who didn't *actually* understand the idiomatic hebrew of the time. so he made some hilarious "literal" translations - the eye of the needle is the most well-known one but there are many others that two famous religious scholars collaborated together to uncover, on the basis that neither of them tried to convert the other away from their respective religions:)
thirdly, we have the "cranks and myths and conspiracy" brigade who like to make a hell of a lot of noise, increasing the probability that even rational people will steer clear of the entire area, *especially* if they are in a quotes renowned quotes scientific established career.
lastly, that analogy. imagine that we are talking about... say... fighter jets, not ancient flying vehicles. let's imagine that you've _heard_ about fighter jets (never seen one). you might have access to the internet, but you've never seen a "fighter jet" go over your head, making an enormous amount of noise. but you heard on the internet that they exist. in the context of a remote country, isolated from the rest of the world, ask yourself the question "why hasn't anyone in *our* country built one of these fighter jets?".
and that really helps hammer it home, that these projects are *expensive*.... even if people believe they are practical (not a complete fabrication, at all, thanks to the cranks, in the first place). i went through the list of materials (the metallurgy section): there are *sixty* types of alloys that need to be made!
so, yeah, i can fully understand why it hasn't been done in today's modern society.
To some degree, I can accept "lost technology." A claim that the Indians had some metallurgical technique that was lost and rediscovered by Europeans? I can buy that. I'd still require proof, but I can accept that this might happen. Primitive glider-type airplanes developed by Indians thousands of years ago?
honestly i have no idea if they had primitive glider-type planes: the surviving sanskrit texts don't describe such.
Indians a thousand years ago having modern or even futuristic technology that was lost without a trace save for writing in one book (which might be open to interpretation) is *NOT* extraordinary proof.
i didn't say "proof", i effectively said "*after* reading the sanskrit documents (or their available translations), make a judgement for yourself". about what you've written: think about this - how, in a country where there is no internet, no telephones, no long-distance communication of *any* kind, would there be any kind of "backup" record? we're lucky that even the vimanas documents survived.
cast your mind back thousands of years. most people you know - most people you've *ever* known - are subsistence farmers. the stories you hear - which became legend - are of the "gods" battling in flying chariots. pretty incredible, huh? and yet there are people who come back from battles who tell you these amazing tales...... how many of those people would have writing skills? or know about electricity? (or even care)
now compare that situation to today. do you know about electricity? do you know about something called "chemistry"? of course you do, and you have something called "the internet" where you could even teach yourself about those things.... but the people in power at the time? they would have had extraordinary wealth, and extraordinary power. they would have had scholars, and engineers and much more - and the important thing is that in order to keep the knowledge they learned from falling into the hands of their enemies, they would have kept that knowledge *secret*, wouldn't they? and that would be easy to do: have a bunch of guys with great memories whom you keep an eye on (you can always kill them if you get attacked, whereas books could be stolen).
so it is not too hard to imagine that:
a) there could be secretive development of scientific knowledge b) that knowledge could be kept from everyone outside of the immediate power base c) that it would be so unbelievably far advanced from the rest of the society that they would consider it to be "magic", and the people controlling it to be "gods".
does that make any sense? and is there anything unreasonable or irrational about either a, b or c, given what we know about the history of india around that era?
now, regarding the "interpretation" comment: again, i can only say read the texts yourself. make the interpretation yourself". if you don't have time to do that, and are still interested, find someone that you trust who has.
one thing i did find fascinating about that link i sent: the sanskrit texts apparently describe pilot clothing and diet! the clothing is designed to be fire-proof as well as extremely warm, and the recommended diet is five (!) meals a day. the texts also describe knowledge of different layers to our atmosphere (five are given names). the author of the analysis at the link i sent says that he had asked an airforce pilot to review the text, and he mentions that it is well-known amongst pilots - especially combat ones - that the physical toll of combat aircraft is extremely high. modern medical professionals therefore recommend that combat pilots eat small very frequent meals,. it is also a taboo in military airforce circles to fly on an empty stomach.
question. how would they know this? a simple "glider" in no way puts its pilot through signifncant physical stress. gliders simply do not reach the required altitude. and how would they know that there are different regions to our atmosphere unless someone had actually been up there?
random moderators: BEFORE considering hitting "-1" please read the full text below.
if you look up the papers they apparently had mercury-based plasma ion drives (which i hear NASA and the JPL have been researching for some time) as well as highly destructuve beam weapons (which i hope *nobody* in modern times has been researching). the papers are thousands of years old, and have been well-known for a considerable amount of time, mostly for the metallurgy as the papers go through absolutely every single detail required, from sourcing the materials to creating the crucibles and kilns, to making the garments needed to deal with altitude. there's a story on the internet that someone in india, during victorian times, actually recreated one of these machines, directly from the instructions. when the british heard about it they had it destroyed.
doing a quick google search.... yes, this is the vedic "vimanas" being presented at this conference: it's actually nothing "new", it's just that peoples' reactions are... well, if one wants to put it charitably, it's just surrounded with an amazing amount of incredulity and disbelief, but if we are honest the better way to put it is that it is absolute pure arrogance to think that our current level of technology is the first and only peak of technological capability on the planet: it's just that we are far more connected now than we were before, so word of new discoveries tends to get around.
that "incredulity" you can counteract by simply reviewing the documents for yourself. i recommend focussing on the sections covering the science that *has* been re-discovered since the techniques were lost, for example the mining and metallurgy sections. once you have at least verified that these sections correspond precisely with modern techniques, is it so hard a stretch of one's mind to consider that the other sections and instructions might be correct as well?
pions are basically made up of quarks just like the neutron and the proton: there's nothing magical about it, and has absolutely nothing to do with gravitons (if such even exist except as a mathematical concept). the difference is that pions only contain two quarks (rather than three) and so they're not stable. imagine throwing two magnets into the air very very carefully and having them spin around each other for a very brief period of time. if they fly apart, splat no more particle: if they touch, splat no more particle. but for that incredibly short duration where the two quarks successfully spin around each other in close orbit, there you have a "pion".
wait... floppy disks are a particularly coarse-grained media, meaning that they are quite likely to survive (in storage) for a very long time. also, they don't contain silicon ICs. does anyone remember the great idea of SD Cards with built-in OSes and a WIFI antenna, and how those have been used as spyware tools? likewise USB sticks could have absolutely anything in them. so i don't think it's such a good idea for the whitehouse to move away from floppy disks.
blackberries on the other hand, i heard a story back in 2007 that the entire email infrastructure at the time ran off of *two* machines (two physical machines). one for the US, one for the rest of the world. i trust that the whitehouse email doesn't go through a single server. that would be... bad.
normally one would google that and it would come up with instances where people have installed GNU/Linux OSes on the specific hardware in question, and the older the hardware and the more popular it is, the larger the chance of finding someone else who has done exactly that and created a report (or five). unfortunately however, at this very moment, the search engine results show a huge number of interfering references to a site known as "slashdot", as well as RSS syndicated links to the same.
so you can either just risk it and try it, then get on one of the popular forums, or you can wait for things to calm down a bit and the google searches which include slashdot syndication of its front-page drop off the pagerank a bit (should take a couple of days).
that having been said: it looks like it's a standard laptop with an x86 chipset, so it should almost certainly boot. touchpanels tend to use all the same chipsets, and those have been supported in the linux kernel for some time due to GPL compliance, so you should be fine.
let's be clear about a couple of things. one: our vision is designed by natural evolution, and staring continuously at objects only 0.5 to 1 metre away is not part of nature's remit. two: our vision *does not* deteriorate with age, it deteriorates with *misuse* or more specifically *lack* of use: more specifically *lack of training*. eyes have *muscles*. fail to train those muscles and guess what happens?
there is a guy who decided he did not want to be enlisted in the vietnam draft, so two weeks prior to the eye exam he borrowed some glasses from a friend who had terrible vision. the deterioration in his vision as a result was so poor that he failed the eye exam, and so was ineligible for the draft.
now, afterwards, he reasoned that if it took only two weeks to turn his vision so disastrously badly wrong, it would, logically, be perfectly reasonable to attempt some eye exercises to get his formerly perfect vision back. the result: after some experimentation with some exercises, he got his perfect vision back.
now aged over 70 years old this person - who has written a book about the exercises that keep your eyes healthy - has twenty FORTY vision.
why am i mentioning this?
because aged 10 i was given prescription glasses. i had discovered computers a few years beforehand and had begun to spend significant hours in front of computers. every few years, as required and advised, i returned to the opticians. my eyes - EVERY TIME I RETURNED - were described to be "worse than before".
so aged 10 i had something like - 0.5 diopters, but by aged 36 i had -4.0 in one eye, -3.5 in the other and an astigmatism on top of that of -1. i spent $USD 1,000 on two pairs of glasses: one was +1 diopters less than the other. driving to holland, in the dark, i wore the "distance" glasses for 15 minutes and got such a massive headache from them that i had to wear the "reading" glasses.
so that was 2005. i realised that, after being told by opticians at the time "oh, people who are short-sighted are used to seeing perfectly at long distance so we give them an extra -0.25 just to help", that the problem was that i was being given glasses each and every single time that were too strong, but not only that, that i was having my vision "corrected" to distance, was then looking at objects only 0.5 to 1.0 metres away and my eyes were AUTOMATICALLY ADJUSTING.
at some point i then made the stupid mistake of getting a 24in iMac. huge wide screen, i thought it was fantastic. except that over the next three years using it, because i was sitting (unavoidably) close to it, my eyes trained themselves to deal with the wide angle... by going *prism*.
now when i look rapidly to the left or right at any object a distance further away than 2 metres, i CANNOT FOCUS ON IT. i see double for a good couple of seconds. in the dark, lights over two metres away i cannot bring into focus at all. however if the object is only 0.5 to 1 metre away, i am able to *really rapidly* flick my eyes backwards and forwards, focussing successfully within fractions of a second, absorbing the information on-screen.
in other words, guess what? my eyes *keep adjusting* to the conditions that i put them through.
now i have stopped getting prescription glasses entirely: i am absolutely fed up with the ignorant optician industry screwing up my vision. if i go to an optician, they think they know better and they damn well don't. they tell you that your eyes deteriorate with age, but that is absolute rubbish: the muscles around your eyes are just like any other muscle: they need *exercise*.
so that's what this old guy advocates: eye exercise. several times a day, stop what you are doing and look in the distance for 8 to 10 minutes. if you want to get rid of short-sightedness, pick two objects, one just at the edge of your "blurry" vision and one just inside it. look at the first, look at the second, look at the first, look at the second - focus on each as you do so. then, move the two objects (your t
a standard gnu/linux distro like debian, when installed on that ARM11 device, can have CUPS installed on it with no difficulty: CUPS has absolutely nothing to do with ARM itself, especially if you get a proper printer that doesn't try anything stupid like ship proprietary drivers (.deb files) directly off their own web site. basically if you get an HP printer you'll be fine. i did get the absolute latest 3-in-1 printer from Curry's last month, and i did have to install hplip from source but that's because the printer required hplip 3.1.16 and the version of debian i had for a client only had 3.1.12 - however amazingly HP's ready-to-go compilation script walked through the process of installing the prerequisites and got it all done. kinda impressive.
anyway so printing is not a problem. you are then going to *not* get him a chromebook, you're going to replace the OS (as someone else suggested) or you are going to sell the chromebook on ebay and get him a 200 quid Lenovo B30-50 from Tesco's or ebuyer.com or something similar (a big 15in 1366x768 LCD - awesome) - then you're going to install Debian GNU/Linux on that, too. setting up 3G dongles is really easy: remember to install the usbmodeswitch package. there is plenty of advice out there on setting up 3G dongles - remember to look up and set the correct APN settings in wvdial.conf (or whatever you end up using)
then, to make sure that he can print remotely, you're going to install a VPN on both devices (i recommend openvpn however tinc would do just as well and is slightly easier to set up) - both the ARM11 print server and the laptop, and you're going to either use the server that you're already maintaining, or you're going to ask a friend if you can put a VPN on their server, *or* you're going to get *another* of those ARM11 devices and send it to these guys:
basically for $EUR 36 per year they will host you an ARM11 device on a 100mbit/sec link. the power requirements and size are so small that it's perfectly feasible.
so that's what you're going to do... or not. it's a lot of work to set up, but if those are the requirements (remote printing access) then that's what needs to be done. it's going to be costly, however, as both the ARM11 device and the portable device will *both* need 3G connectivity.
honestly i can thoroughly recommend going a different route, as follows:
* go to a local three networks store and buy a Huawei MIFI (3G+WIFI gateway) device * go to Maplin's and get a "mobile" 2-port WIFI router. i looked one up that could be re-flashed with OpenWRT. * once the firmware is re-flashed on the "mobile" 2-port WIFI router, change it to be a *CLIENT* of the Huawei MIFI device. * also set up the WIFI router to "bridge" mode (between the WIFI and the 2 ports: make them all on the same LAN space) * plug the ARM11 device into one of the 2 LAN ports. * associate the laptop with the MIFI's WIFI network as well
now you have the ARM11 device set up as a printer on the same (bridged) LAN as the WIFI devices, including the MIFI and the laptop. if you have installed OpenWRT as i suggest then you can also install the OpenWRT openvpn package on it (or tinc), and you then have 24x7 access to the systems on the network, and can manage them remotely *including* logging in to the ARM11 device and clearing out any stuck print jobs without needing to drive N+ miles.
this is what i have set up for a client (in one form or another). with this above 2nd scenario you are _still_ not going to get a chromebook, you're going to get a laptop with debian installed that you can actually manage (including remotely). the difference is that it'll be easier for your father because it will be internal WIFI, not a dangling external USB 3G modem. wicd-client is much easier to comprehend, i find, than the 3G management programs for GNU/Linux. err, there's WIFI networks and errr, there's a place where you press "connect" and errr that
you have two kinds of deployment situations: those that need to be in the field, and those that can remain back at a base (preferably outside of the country). i would question even the need for an army to *have* the second type of individual when they could just as easily have someone from e.g. the CIA or elsewhere be contracted in.
so that would leave the first group - hackers that could need to be deployed in the field. now, i don't know about you, but if i was an ordinary soldier, along-side someone who basically could not run 20 metres without getting out of breath, i would hardly have any respect for them. i would consider them to be a liability, unable to fend for themselves, and, much worse than that, such unfit individuals could potentially end up risking the lives of their fellow soldiers under combat situations.
and that's a real serious problem, right there. knowing that, i can say absolutely for sure that even aged 44 there is absolutely no way that i would wish to go into a warzone without the same kind of physical training that *all my peers* had been through. that training is *really* important. it's about letting *you* know what you can achieve, as well as the rest of your squad. everyone gets the same level of training, so that everyone knows that they can count on each other when it really matters.
and the US army *wants* to have hackers be ostracised, uncertain if they can get themselves out of physical danger, and be a risk to people around them. that sounds... hmm, it sounds like a stereotypical hacker if i am absolutely honest! but having the US army make that even worse... hmmm...
... haaaa, veery interesting: wasn't there an article on slashdot very recently that said that yoga apparently is a better cardiovascular work-out than aerobic exercise? and wouldn't it be fascinating if yoga activated DNA in different [much more beneficial] ways from aerobic exercise. meditation [deep breathing included] is *also* a form of exercise. wouldn't it be fascinating to find that there are actual *real* physiological benefits - at the cellular level - to all this so-called "mumbo jumbo" spiritual guru "nonsense", and that it all had *real* measureable benefits that *really did* prolong your life?
" Drug companies cannot illegally prioritize profits over patients"
actually, it's not illegal, and in fact what the judge is doing is directly against the Articles of Incorporation of the Company. if this is something you're not familiar with, watch the first few minutes of the Documentary called "The Corporation" or read professor Yunus's book "Creating a World Without Poverty". basically it is a LEGAL REQUIREMENT that the Directors of Corporations enact - pathologically and absolutely - the Articles of Incorporation of a Company, otherwise they may either be faced with a vote by their shareholders to resign, or they may face jail time.... and the Articles of Incorporation typically state that profit MUST be maximised to the absolute, total, complete, without fail absolute 100% top absolute top priority above all else WITHOUT fail.
so under the Articles of Incorporation of this Drug Company, saving lives is not a priority: making MONEY - the absolute maximum amount possible - is the absolute top priority.
so this judge's decision, therefore, was quite literally the only way by which those lives could be prioritised over and above the profits of the Corporation. you really should watch "The Documentary". its premise is that if a Corporation was a real person instead of a fictitous one, they give 10 reasons why that "person" would be locked up forever as pathologically and criminally insane. i no longer call Corporations "Corporations, i call them "Cancerations" because they pathologically consume all resources to further themselves with blatant disregard.
i had 9 of those smartphone / pocket-pc style devices back at the time: the absolute best one was the HTC Universal, as it was more like a hand-held clamshell laptop with built-in 3G. you _used_ to be able to get information about them on handhelds.org but we coordinated through #htc-linux (since taken over by android dummies) and used wiki.xda-developers.com (since taken over by android wannabe modders). [note to xda-developer forum users: i may be being slightly unfair though about the android dummies and wannabes: i apologise in advance to any of you that aren't so stupid as to be able to find and pay attention long enough to read slashdot:) ]
so you're going to have to dig... and you'll almost certainly need to begin with the 2.6 era linux kernel tree, which should give you a very very big hint about what you face, here. to give you an example: the fastest i've ever been able to reverse-engineer linux onto a device was 3 weeks and that was because it already had a [GPL-violating] linux kernel on it, where they had left some clues around and it was possible to poke around in/proc.
beyond that, the fastest i managed - and i could not get PM/wakeup to work because i could not locate the correct RAM/device re-initialisation parameters - was six to eight weeks on the HTC/Compaq Ipaq, i believe it was called the hw6915.
beyond _that_, the _longest_ i ever heard someone taking (and this was because it was worth it) to get full driver functionality was THREE YEARS, and that was for the HTC Universal (aka O2 "XDA III").
please please DO NOT underestimate how much work it takes to do reverse-engineering. these handhelds are actually far more complex pieces of kit, in engineering and in software terms, than any laptop or desktop PC you've ever encountered. the HTC Universal had SEVEN audio output paths for example, and over four audio input paths. there were over 110 GPIO pins on its Intel PXA ARM processor, but these were nowhere near enough, so they had to use an external GPIO IC (we called it ASIC3). but... they actually ran out of GPIO pins on that *as well*, so they ended up utilising the 16 pins of GPIO on the Ericsson 3G GSM modem (only contactable over USB!) in order to control some of the functions such as camera light.
so in many ways you are actually better off designing (and paying to have made) your own device. that is not a joke, in the slightest bit. it will take you less time and will cost you less in lost earnings from having to work full-time on the reverse-engineering. and before you splutter in disbelief, there are people who have done exactly that: Dr Schaeller did the GTA04 fairly recently (fits into a Neo FreeRunner case), and in that way he at least got to pick a) a modern-ish processor b) the best components that were available c) he got CONTROL OVER THE DEVICE DRIVERs, and he didn't have to _guess_ what the GPIO maps and memory maps are.
basically, what i'm trying to say is that if you cannot find a pre-existing project (you didn't mention what devices you actually have) that has done the reverse-engineering, unless you are actually thinking of learning reverse-engineering as a useful specialist marketable skill, either throw those devices into landfill, give them to someone who doesn't mind winceouch, or break them down for parts and sell the components on ebay. check beforehand to make sure that they're desirable parts of course.
of course... i say "throw them into landfill", which is directly and vehemently against our social responsibility, but unfortunately when actually buying these devices we make selfish decisions, not socially responsible ones, not least because they *aren't any alternatives*. now http://phonebloks.com/ is looking to change that in the smartphone space, and i'm looking to change that in the everything-else-device arena (starting here https://www.crowdsupply.com/eo...)
i feel that the answer lies in the sentence "the internet is driven by c". if you want direct performance, executable compactness as well as operational efficiency (that is also massive step up from assembly language), you have *one* option available to you: c. that means that apache, wine, postgresql, openldap, cups, samba, libc6, the python interpreter itself, the linux kernel, the windows NT kernel and many more OSes: they're written in c.
only when some of those constraints - performance, compactness and operational efficiency - may be relaxed in favour of, for example, a higher bang-per-buck ratio in the expressive power behind the lines of code written (python dict), or where code-resuse is critical without too much inconvenience (templates and objects of c++), *then* you begin to choose alternative programming languages.
but as a general rule, if ever you see the word "system" or "service" in a sentence (operating "system", web "service"), automatically that implies "high performance" which automatically implies "high efficiency needed" and that means "c".
so i feel it is therefore much more interesting to note the situations in businesses where c is *not* used despite there being circumstances where performance is critical. when people choose java for web services, for example.
Yes, I also have griped about SF that shoehorns the distant future into the mold of today, or of the past. I have special disdain for those who want to recreate the wild west, or the age of piracy, or empires of the past with space opera trappings. If you love the old west, write westerns, man!
in the turkey lexicon written by bruce sterling to help new sci-fi writers, there's a special phrase to describe the type of book where "laser pistol" replaces the word "six shooter" and "steed" replaces "six-legged mounted alien beast". it's called "The Western"!
there are many more: you are not alone in encountering badly-written sci-fi by novelists who quotes want to get in on the sci-fi genre act quote. but one that really really surprised me: a book in the "Eve Online" universe. it begins *literally* with the "White Room Syndrome" and i was like "OH NOOO! the white room syndrome!!" - that's where the main character wakes up in a white room, with only one (white) door, and no furniture, with no memory of past events, and it symbolises the author's own total lack of imagination at being able to begin the story even from page one - but i kept reading and found that, actually, there was a heck of a lot of good in it. it was the author's first and only book, and he was extremely brave to attempt it, and, apart from being semi-starwars-esque in places and "film-drama-queen-esque" in others, the story worked really _really_ well, kept my attention and made really good use of advanced biotech, cloning, machine consciousness, wormhole technology and much more to actually *tell a story*.
bruce sterling wrote an extremely funny and valuable guide to sci-fi writers which i've mentioned here before on slashdot, and it has been expanded ever since. ah yeah here we go: http://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/tu... it's well-worth reading just for amusement value. the ironical thing is that this well-known sci-fi author, charles stross, is telling us that many sci-fi authors today are falling into some of the traps outlined by that lexicon and valuable guide.
whilist it seems flippant therefore to be telling them "write better sci-fi!" it has to be said that sci-fi writers have set themselves a much harder task than any other writing genre. first and foremost: they need to be good story tellers! and almost secondary to that, they need to be extremely knowledgeable about technology... *because their readers are*. whenever i read a new sci-fi novel by an author that i've never heard of before - and i do not do that often because it is a risk - i often find myself critiquing the author's style. anything where they assume i am an idiot (by doing things like explaining cloud computing to me), that's when the magic of the story is lost, and i know i just read a story by someone who is not going to ever be a successful sci-fi writer. it's a fine line to walk.
" The kind of phone that only freakin' astronauts had in 1994.".... and only grandmothers and the *really* discerning geeks who have seen exactly the effects that the OP describes, and have decided to do something about it.
my advice on an old phone: get a nokia 6310i. that one is still amazing, and they sell out within an hour at market stalls. on a new phone: get a cheap PAYG nokia. they're still made, they now have a 30-day (30 DAY!!) standby, they still run the same OS as the 6310i (just upgraded to colour), and they're actually lighter. my partner has one, whilst i have a 3310.
i've taken up tennis in a big way: nearly every day now for over 20 months i do at least... something. i practice on a wall on days i don't have a regular partner, and when i remember i do the TM asanas routine (use google image search to find it) to counteract the intensity of the exercise i do. and drink a huge amount of water: i get through about a litre an hour. this is *important* because otherwise i find i really really suffer the next day (which shows in my inability to do the yoga, which is precisely why i do it, to check that my body's not full of toxins. as far as yoga's concerned: spirituality be buggered, i want to know if my body's ok!!)
but the reason why i took up tennis is not because it's physical exercise, it's because it's *complex* physical exercise, and, when played properly, also requires strategic thinking. i am training both left-handed and right-handed in order to make it more challenging, and also so as to be
then also i am eating marmite (high in B vitamins) without which i swear i become much more tired and unable to remeber things day-to-day. i'm also taking green-lipped mussel extract - the lower-priced stuff when i am low on funds and the really *really* good stuff (like this - http://teamfrezzor.com/truewis...) when i can afford it. without it, within days my knuckles start to ache and the arthritis in my right hip starts to be painful again.
the only other piece of advice i can give is that habits typically take between 30-40 days to break. for example smoking is *not* addictive in the ways that people think. nicotine only takes 36 hours to become addictive,.. and 36 hours to completely clear your system. the *psychological* addiction however - the craving to visit the same restaurants, bars and haunts [where others also happen to smoke].... *that's* what keeps people hooked.
this is really really important: anyone wishing to make a difference in the world really REALLY needs to read the book written by Professor Yunus, the joint winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Price, "Creating a World Without Poverty".
in his book, Professor Yunus describes how he naively studied Economics because he believed that he would be able to change his country's financial situation through studying first world economies. after graduation he set out just after one of the worst natural disasters his country had experienced and realised how completely pointless his studies had been. however he did not give up, and set out to work out what the problem actually was.
he learned that the poor are first and foremost incredibly resourceful... mostly because they have to. he also learned that many of them are, because there are no enforceable usury laws, permanently kept in debt to money-lenders. this shocked him so badly that once he freed an entire village from debt just from the small change in his wallet: something like $USD 15 was all it took to pay off a decade of usury.
what he discovered is that the gratitude of these people when freed from their former situation is immeasurable. the Grameen Bank doesn't have lawyers or debt collectors. the people that they lend money to are so GRATEFUL that they work non-stop to turn their lives around and pay off their loan. in fact, the repayment success rate is around NINETY EIGHT percent. it's so high that the *GRAMEEN BANK* considers it to be THEIR FAULT if one of their customers is ever in default. by contrast in the western world the default rate is 88%. i'll repeat that again in case it's not clear: only TWELVE PERCENT of creditors in the western world pay their debts on time, every time, and in full.
but the main reason why anyone wishing to help the emerging markets and the third world should read his book is because he patiently, with all the knowledge from his economics background, outlines why NGOs, Charity and the "Corporate Social Responsibility" clauses of standard profit-maximising Capitalist Corporations are all worse than doomed but are guaranteed to be ineffective at best and invariably seriously damaging and counter-productive.
right at the start of his book he outlines a surprising offer by Danone to work with him (follow his advice) to actually be effective. it was Professor Yunus's first experience of having been "under the microscope" of people with both big resources and heart. in other words the team at Danone were huge fans of what Yunus was trying to achieve: when he explained to them the financial structure that was needed, they listened, and they did it. they did not go in with a charity, or with donations: they set up a "non-loss, non-dividend" business, selling *locally-produced* yoghurt that happened to have the nutritients that the local population happened (by a not-coincidence) to be chronically deficient in.
the yohurt was sold not at a loss but at an affordable financially sustainable price because the focus was on remaining *stable*, not on exploitation through maximisation of profits: the focus was on allowing people to feel proud of what they achieved, and to take responsibility for their own wealth. they were EMPOWERED through the enormous generous resources of Danone's, but it was a successful venture because they LISTENED to what Professor Yunus had to say.
1. grow crappy crops with free seeds and lots of expensive water, 2. grow good groups with seeds that you need to pay for but use less water?
#2 will make you more money, so the cost of the seeds is a non-factor. #1 will make you poor, because when it doesn't rain your crops die.
So, what exactly is the issue?
this is a completely wrong analysis. if (2) was true those people would have been dead centuries or millenia ago. the fact that they are still alive tells you that they get by, and that, honestly, is good enough.
there was an attempt a few decades ago to do exactly what DuPont is doing [again]. i do not understand why 1st world countries do not leave the 3rd world alone to grow their own food. 1st world conditions are NOT THE SAME as 3rd world conditions.
the study that i heard about was exactly the same situation. a 3rd world country which had extremely poor yields was interfered with by a 1st world country providing donations of high-yield maize. for three to four years the success of the trials resulted in bumper crops and the surrounding farmers clambered onto the 1st world genetic variety maize.
then there was a drought.
the high-yield 1st world maize died, and the entire area went into famine. next year, because nothing had grown, nobody had any food the year after, either.
basically it turned out that the low-yield maize had a MASSIVE genetic diversity. some variants thrived in good conditions, some grew successfully *EVEN IN DROUGHT CONDITIONS*. no matter what happened, those people always got some food. not necessarily a lot, but enough so that they didn't die.
now the problem was with this stupid, stupid interference by a 1st world country was that because everyone in the area had converted over to this wonderful high-yield maize, NOBODY HAD ANY OF THE OLD GENETIC VARIETY LEFT.
it was a decade before the country properly recovered, and that was just from one drought.
so the conclusion is, unescapably, that DuPont is intent on killing people just to make a profit, as this isn't the first time that providing 1st world maize to 3rd world countries has gone very very wrong.
this is pure speculation here, but my guess is that the people (politicians) protesting this research are quite likely to be the ones in charge of classified funding efforts for military, espionage and CIA equivalent research... and deployment of those same tools. if you've ever read Neal Stephenson's book "Cobweb" you'll know exactly what is most likely to be going on.
so, in essence, those people (politicians) know damn well that the espionage, domestic and political manipulation tools that they funded are quite likely to show up as anomalous activity should there ever be any tools (such as Truthy) provided to the general public, or any kind of research done to ascertain which "memes" *should* spread and which should not. for if there is anything that is detected which is *different* from normal expectations (a meme spread when it shouldn't have, and oh incidentally what was the source of that disruptive influence again?) it's really not going to go down too well with the people who *already* manipulate us from the shadows.
so i think you'll find that the people (politicians) protesting most loudly are the ones who are using media manipulation tools, and they're afraid that this research will be used to identify them, basically.
yes, i definitely have a question. i heard the statistic that the concentration of heavy and rare earth metals is now *higher* in landfill sites than it is in the original mines that they came from, which, if true, is a global disgrace for which all of us are responsible. firstly, is this actually true, and secondly, is anyone doing anything about the extraction of rare earth metals from the electronics in which they were originally embedded?
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whilst i find the practices of apple absolutely deplorable - forcing people to sign up for an ID in order to use hardware products that they have paid for, taking so much information that even *banks* won't work with them - bizarrely the amount of money that people pay them is sufficient for apple to spend considerable resources on high-quality components and design.
i have bought a stack of laptops in the past (and always installed Debian on them - see http://lkcl.net/reports/) and have found them to be okay, but always within 2 to 3 years they are showing their age or in some cases completely falling apart. the 2nd Acer TravelMate C112 i bought i actually wore a hole through the left shift key with my fingernail after 2 years of use. hard drives died, screen backlights failed, an HP laptop had such bad design on the power socket that it shorted out one day and almost caught fire. i had to scramble for a good few seconds to pull the battery out, smoke pouring out of the machine as the PMICs glowed.
about 6 years ago my partner had the opportunity to buy both an 18in and a 24in iMac at discounted prices. i immediately installed Debian on it: it took 4 days because grub2-efi was highly undocumented and experimental at the time. so i had a huge 1920x1200 24in screen (which over the next few years actually damaged my eyes because i was too close: my eyesight is now "prism" - i've documented this here on slashdot in the past), a lovely dual-core XEON, 2gb of RAM and it was *quiet*. there is a huge heatsink in the back, and the design uses passive cooling (vertical air convection).
awesome... except not very portable. and no spying or registration of confidential data with some arbitrary company that you *KNOW* is providing your details to the NSA, otherwise there's this conversation which begins "y'know it's *real* hard to get that export license for your products, if you know what i mean, mr CEO".
so, when i moved to holland i had to leave the 24in iMac behind - apart from anything, 2gb of RAM was just not enough. i leave firefox open for 4-7 days (basically until it crashes), opening over 150 sometimes even as many as 250 tabs in a single window. it gets to about 4gb of RAM and starts to become a problem: that's when i kill it. on the iMac, it was consuming most of the resident RAM. i compile programs: 2gb of RAM is barely enough for the linker phase of applications like webkit (which requires 1.6gb of RESIDENT memory in order to complete within a reasonable amount of time). i run VMs with OSes for study.
so i was used to the 1900x1200 screen now, where i could get *five* xterms across a single window. i run fvwm2 with a 6x4 virtual screen, and run over 30 xterms in different places, 3 different web browsers; as i am now developing hardware i run CAD programs in one fvwm2 virtual screen, PDFs in the ones next to it, i run Blender in one virtual screen, OpenSCAD in another, firefox in another, chromium in yet another, then i have to view and manage client machines so i use rdesktop to connect to those (move over to a free virtual window area to do it) - the list goes on and on.
so i figured, "hmmm laptop... but with good screen. must have lots of RAM too, minimum 8gb, must have decent processor". i then began investigating, and found the Lenovo Ideapad. great! let's buy it! .... except their web site crashed. so i then - reluctantly - began investigating iMac laptops. 2560x1600 LCD, 8gb of RAM, dual-core dual-threaded processor: $USD 1500 and *in the UK*, with a U.S. keyboard so nobody was buying it. researched it, saw the success reports of people installing debian on it, knew it could be done: sold, instantly.
so now i am extremely happy with this machine - not with apple themselves - but with the hardware that i have. it's light, it's fast, it's a sturdy aluminum case, the fan only comes on if i swish large OpenSCAD models around in 3D (or if firefox gets overbloated as usual).
the only downsi
dear karmashock,
thank you - genuinely - for making your feelings known so clearly. it is not often that these kinds of words get through on slashdot: so often they are treated as "troll" or "flaimbait", but your words are genuine and from the heart, and everyone can see that plainly.
i've said this often enough, but it is worth repeating: i am not a U.S. citizen but i know that where the U.S. leads, everyone else follows. so it matters *a lot* that the U.S. remain a stable country and a shining example for the rest of the world. the USA uses something like 25% of the world's resources and is only 1/8th the world's population: obviously not everyone can follow *that* example or we would need more Earths to live on!
the only thing i can suggest is that if you are truly a patriot, read the U.S. Constitution again. it was in the film "National Treasure" that that incredibly critical section first came to my attention - the one about "every citizen having the absolute duty to uphold it" and even to *overthrow* the government if it becomes tyrannical.
so i'm absolutely serious: think hard about that. i don't think it's quite come to it yet: they're being quite subtle about it as well as, in some ways, being really quite self-delusional in the genuine belief that they are doing the right thing, and that in itself is part of the problem. these are *rational people* in power, but they are justifying some pretty borderline decisions.
i guess what i'm really saying is: talk to other people about this. get a consensus. find out if other people believe that your government has gone too far, to the point of being tyrannical. if other people don't believe that's the case, then that's fine too. but if they do, then, collectively, you know what to do.
didn't we just see a report from the NSA that the people who bombed the World Trade Centre didn't use encryption but instead used obfuscation - sending their messages to each other with subjects that would *deliberately* trigger SPAM filters, such as "Buy Viagra Online"?
i realise several people have said it already, but i wanted to add that i bought a macbook pro with the 2560x1600 LCD, dual core with 8gb of RAM and it wasn't until loadavg went above 4.0 for over a minute that i even realised that it had a fan at all. it's an aluminium case (watch the edges: they are actually quite sharp).
now, people may say they are expensive but i managed to get hold of one that had been imported into the UK, and had a US keyboard, it was only $USD 1500 where all the ones with UK keyboards were $USD 2,000. given the resolution of the screen and the amount of RAM i considered it to be a serious major bargain and a long-term investment: i anticipate running this machine for at least 5 years.
now, the only down-side is that it has a 256gbyte SSD, which these days is quite small. it does however have USB3 so can use external ultra-fast USB3 SATA drives. but that's not the main down-side: the _real_ problem is that in the EU, power is not earthed properly. so when you plug the PSU in, there is considerable EMI which can actually give you an electric shock if you happen for example to put your foot on a metal radiator.
checking in /var/log/syslog it was *swamped* with SATA resets, so much so that i actually had to move to a tmpfs for /var/log and restart all services so that they used it (there are better ways to do this). the debian page for macbook pros with SSDs describes a workaround which carries out a reset on the SATA device (i forget what it is) but i found that this was *nowhere near* adequate, even if added to a cron job and run every single minute. the problem was of course compounded by the fact that each SATA reset was accompanied by a syslog message which, of course, resulted in a write, which, of course, went wrong, causing another reset. by moving /var/log to a tmpfs i broke the loop, and the resets only occur every 5 to 30 seconds, which i can live with.
it's actually good that i'm running debian because if this still had a proprietary OS on it there would be nothing i could have done about the problem.
anyway, _despite_ this, i would *still* recommend 100% getting a macbook pro [and replacing its OS]. the screen is awesome: i left xterm at its default font size, very quickly got used to the tiny characters, and - get this: i can fit *TEN* 80x51 xterms on one screen! i think that's absolutely hilarious, and for programming it's absolutely amazing. currently i have 4 xterms *on the same screen* with a firefox window that's at 1300 x 1200 pixels! i could make it more but i find that web pages don't really properly stretch beyond that as they're usually designed for around 1200 pixels wide at the most, these days.
so, yeah - get macbook pros but please for goodness sake dump the OS.
Our lead emissions have left a trace in ice cores. As has our industrial production of CO2. We've got radar-trackable space junk in graveyard orbit that isn't going to go anywhere for millions of years. Our nuclear tests have left detectable traces of long-lived isotopes in ice cores too. If there had been any advanced industrial civilisation in the last hundred thousand years, we'd have found it.
where on earth did you get the impression that india was an advanced industrial civilisation thousands of years ago? have you read any of the legends - the mahabarata and so on? it was *backwards*! only the people in power had the kinds of unlimited wealth similar to governments and large corporations of today. and - as now - they keep things incredibly secret. the advantage that they had then over today is the total lack of communication. the people in power at the time were so far removed in terms of wealth and knowledge and resources that they were commonly viewed - quite literally - as living gods.
so no, there *was* no advanced industrial civilisation in india. there were a few incredibly wealthy powerful people with access to machines, scared of letting the knowledge out of their hands of how those machines worked in case their enemies got hold of them (a situation not dissimilar to today...) and then there was everyone else, eking out medieval-style subsistence existence.
there's a story on the internet that someone in india, during victorian times, actually recreated one of these machines, directly from the instructions. when the british heard about it they had it destroyed.
And why hasn't anyone built any of these things since? Why doesn't any one build these now? If it were a matter of following instructions and someone did it on their own at one point a century or so ago, then it should be straightforward to crank out a prototype now.
thinking that through, there could be a series of compounded reasons why not, and we can summarise at the end with an analogy.
firstly, the people who _did_ make these flying machines were the ruling class of india at the time. they had reputations as "living gods" (how if they could quotes fly quotes would the ordinary person believe otherwise?). in other words, they were incredibly wealthy. so they had access to thousands or tens of thousands of workers if they needed them, to go out and find the metals and other resources.
secondly, fast-forwarding to our "modern" times, we have some texts - written in the context of science at the time - which are in sanskrit, and the context is lost. it takes a *lot* of research to work out the missing information that the original authors would have known. the classic funny story here is that the bible was written in hebrew and was translated to greek by someone who didn't *actually* understand the idiomatic hebrew of the time. so he made some hilarious "literal" translations - the eye of the needle is the most well-known one but there are many others that two famous religious scholars collaborated together to uncover, on the basis that neither of them tried to convert the other away from their respective religions :)
thirdly, we have the "cranks and myths and conspiracy" brigade who like to make a hell of a lot of noise, increasing the probability that even rational people will steer clear of the entire area, *especially* if they are in a quotes renowned quotes scientific established career.
lastly, that analogy. imagine that we are talking about... say... fighter jets, not ancient flying vehicles. let's imagine that you've _heard_ about fighter jets (never seen one). you might have access to the internet, but you've never seen a "fighter jet" go over your head, making an enormous amount of noise. but you heard on the internet that they exist. in the context of a remote country, isolated from the rest of the world, ask yourself the question "why hasn't anyone in *our* country built one of these fighter jets?".
and that really helps hammer it home, that these projects are *expensive*.... even if people believe they are practical (not a complete fabrication, at all, thanks to the cranks, in the first place). i went through the list of materials (the metallurgy section): there are *sixty* types of alloys that need to be made!
so, yeah, i can fully understand why it hasn't been done in today's modern society.
To some degree, I can accept "lost technology." A claim that the Indians had some metallurgical technique that was lost and rediscovered by Europeans? I can buy that. I'd still require proof, but I can accept that this might happen. Primitive glider-type airplanes developed by Indians thousands of years ago?
honestly i have no idea if they had primitive glider-type planes: the surviving sanskrit texts don't describe such.
Indians a thousand years ago having modern or even futuristic technology that was lost without a trace save for writing in one book (which might be open to interpretation) is *NOT* extraordinary proof.
i didn't say "proof", i effectively said "*after* reading the sanskrit documents (or their available translations), make a judgement for yourself". about what you've written: think about this - how, in a country where there is no internet, no telephones, no long-distance communication of *any* kind, would there be any kind of "backup" record? we're lucky that even the vimanas documents survived.
cast your mind back thousands of years. most people you know - most people you've *ever* known - are subsistence farmers. the stories you hear - which became legend - are of the "gods" battling in flying chariots. pretty incredible, huh? and yet there are people who come back from battles who tell you these amazing tales... ... how many of those people would have writing skills? or know about electricity? (or even care)
now compare that situation to today. do you know about electricity? do you know about something called "chemistry"? of course you do, and you have something called "the internet" where you could even teach yourself about those things. ... but the people in power at the time? they would have had extraordinary wealth, and extraordinary power. they would have had scholars, and engineers and much more - and the important thing is that in order to keep the knowledge they learned from falling into the hands of their enemies, they would have kept that knowledge *secret*, wouldn't they? and that would be easy to do: have a bunch of guys with great memories whom you keep an eye on (you can always kill them if you get attacked, whereas books could be stolen).
so it is not too hard to imagine that:
a) there could be secretive development of scientific knowledge
b) that knowledge could be kept from everyone outside of the immediate power base
c) that it would be so unbelievably far advanced from the rest of the society that they would consider it to be "magic", and the people controlling it to be "gods".
does that make any sense? and is there anything unreasonable or irrational about either a, b or c, given what we know about the history of india around that era?
now, regarding the "interpretation" comment: again, i can only say read the texts yourself. make the interpretation yourself". if you don't have time to do that, and are still interested, find someone that you trust who has.
one thing i did find fascinating about that link i sent: the sanskrit texts apparently describe pilot clothing and diet! the clothing is designed to be fire-proof as well as extremely warm, and the recommended diet is five (!) meals a day. the texts also describe knowledge of different layers to our atmosphere (five are given names). the author of the analysis at the link i sent says that he had asked an airforce pilot to review the text, and he mentions that it is well-known amongst pilots - especially combat ones - that the physical toll of combat aircraft is extremely high. modern medical professionals therefore recommend that combat pilots eat small very frequent meals,. it is also a taboo in military airforce circles to fly on an empty stomach.
question. how would they know this? a simple "glider" in no way puts its pilot through signifncant physical stress. gliders simply do not reach the required altitude. and how would they know that there are different regions to our atmosphere unless someone had actually been up there?
*think* - please, for goodness sake.
here is an english translation of the papers: http://www.bibliotecapleyades....
random moderators: BEFORE considering hitting "-1" please read the full text below.
if you look up the papers they apparently had mercury-based plasma ion drives (which i hear NASA and the JPL have been researching for some time) as well as highly destructuve beam weapons (which i hope *nobody* in modern times has been researching). the papers are thousands of years old, and have been well-known for a considerable amount of time, mostly for the metallurgy as the papers go through absolutely every single detail required, from sourcing the materials to creating the crucibles and kilns, to making the garments needed to deal with altitude. there's a story on the internet that someone in india, during victorian times, actually recreated one of these machines, directly from the instructions. when the british heard about it they had it destroyed.
doing a quick google search.... yes, this is the vedic "vimanas" being presented at this conference: it's actually nothing "new", it's just that peoples' reactions are... well, if one wants to put it charitably, it's just surrounded with an amazing amount of incredulity and disbelief, but if we are honest the better way to put it is that it is absolute pure arrogance to think that our current level of technology is the first and only peak of technological capability on the planet: it's just that we are far more connected now than we were before, so word of new discoveries tends to get around.
that "incredulity" you can counteract by simply reviewing the documents for yourself. i recommend focussing on the sections covering the science that *has* been re-discovered since the techniques were lost, for example the mining and metallurgy sections. once you have at least verified that these sections correspond precisely with modern techniques, is it so hard a stretch of one's mind to consider that the other sections and instructions might be correct as well?
pions are basically made up of quarks just like the neutron and the proton: there's nothing magical about it, and has absolutely nothing to do with gravitons (if such even exist except as a mathematical concept). the difference is that pions only contain two quarks (rather than three) and so they're not stable. imagine throwing two magnets into the air very very carefully and having them spin around each other for a very brief period of time. if they fly apart, splat no more particle: if they touch, splat no more particle. but for that incredibly short duration where the two quarks successfully spin around each other in close orbit, there you have a "pion".
wait... floppy disks are a particularly coarse-grained media, meaning that they are quite likely to survive (in storage) for a very long time. also, they don't contain silicon ICs. does anyone remember the great idea of SD Cards with built-in OSes and a WIFI antenna, and how those have been used as spyware tools? likewise USB sticks could have absolutely anything in them. so i don't think it's such a good idea for the whitehouse to move away from floppy disks.
blackberries on the other hand, i heard a story back in 2007 that the entire email infrastructure at the time ran off of *two* machines (two physical machines). one for the US, one for the rest of the world. i trust that the whitehouse email doesn't go through a single server. that would be... bad.
normally one would google that and it would come up with instances where people have installed GNU/Linux OSes on the specific hardware in question, and the older the hardware and the more popular it is, the larger the chance of finding someone else who has done exactly that and created a report (or five). unfortunately however, at this very moment, the search engine results show a huge number of interfering references to a site known as "slashdot", as well as RSS syndicated links to the same.
so you can either just risk it and try it, then get on one of the popular forums, or you can wait for things to calm down a bit and the google searches which include slashdot syndication of its front-page drop off the pagerank a bit (should take a couple of days).
that having been said: it looks like it's a standard laptop with an x86 chipset, so it should almost certainly boot. touchpanels tend to use all the same chipsets, and those have been supported in the linux kernel for some time due to GPL compliance, so you should be fine.
let's be clear about a couple of things. one: our vision is designed by natural evolution, and staring continuously at objects only 0.5 to 1 metre away is not part of nature's remit. two: our vision *does not* deteriorate with age, it deteriorates with *misuse* or more specifically *lack* of use: more specifically *lack of training*. eyes have *muscles*. fail to train those muscles and guess what happens?
there is a guy who decided he did not want to be enlisted in the vietnam draft, so two weeks prior to the eye exam he borrowed some glasses from a friend who had terrible vision. the deterioration in his vision as a result was so poor that he failed the eye exam, and so was ineligible for the draft.
now, afterwards, he reasoned that if it took only two weeks to turn his vision so disastrously badly wrong, it would, logically, be perfectly reasonable to attempt some eye exercises to get his formerly perfect vision back. the result: after some experimentation with some exercises, he got his perfect vision back.
now aged over 70 years old this person - who has written a book about the exercises that keep your eyes healthy - has twenty FORTY vision.
why am i mentioning this?
because aged 10 i was given prescription glasses. i had discovered computers a few years beforehand and had begun to spend significant hours in front of computers. every few years, as required and advised, i returned to the opticians. my eyes - EVERY TIME I RETURNED - were described to be "worse than before".
so aged 10 i had something like - 0.5 diopters, but by aged 36 i had -4.0 in one eye, -3.5 in the other and an astigmatism on top of that of -1. i spent $USD 1,000 on two pairs of glasses: one was +1 diopters less than the other. driving to holland, in the dark, i wore the "distance" glasses for 15 minutes and got such a massive headache from them that i had to wear the "reading" glasses.
so that was 2005. i realised that, after being told by opticians at the time "oh, people who are short-sighted are used to seeing perfectly at long distance so we give them an extra -0.25 just to help", that the problem was that i was being given glasses each and every single time that were too strong, but not only that, that i was having my vision "corrected" to distance, was then looking at objects only 0.5 to 1.0 metres away and my eyes were AUTOMATICALLY ADJUSTING.
at some point i then made the stupid mistake of getting a 24in iMac. huge wide screen, i thought it was fantastic. except that over the next three years using it, because i was sitting (unavoidably) close to it, my eyes trained themselves to deal with the wide angle... by going *prism*.
now when i look rapidly to the left or right at any object a distance further away than 2 metres, i CANNOT FOCUS ON IT. i see double for a good couple of seconds. in the dark, lights over two metres away i cannot bring into focus at all. however if the object is only 0.5 to 1 metre away, i am able to *really rapidly* flick my eyes backwards and forwards, focussing successfully within fractions of a second, absorbing the information on-screen.
in other words, guess what? my eyes *keep adjusting* to the conditions that i put them through.
now i have stopped getting prescription glasses entirely: i am absolutely fed up with the ignorant optician industry screwing up my vision. if i go to an optician, they think they know better and they damn well don't. they tell you that your eyes deteriorate with age, but that is absolute rubbish: the muscles around your eyes are just like any other muscle: they need *exercise*.
so that's what this old guy advocates: eye exercise. several times a day, stop what you are doing and look in the distance for 8 to 10 minutes. if you want to get rid of short-sightedness, pick two objects, one just at the edge of your "blurry" vision and one just inside it. look at the first, look at the second, look at the first, look at the second - focus on each as you do so. then, move the two objects (your t
a standard gnu/linux distro like debian, when installed on that ARM11 device, can have CUPS installed on it with no difficulty: CUPS has absolutely nothing to do with ARM itself, especially if you get a proper printer that doesn't try anything stupid like ship proprietary drivers (.deb files) directly off their own web site. basically if you get an HP printer you'll be fine. i did get the absolute latest 3-in-1 printer from Curry's last month, and i did have to install hplip from source but that's because the printer required hplip 3.1.16 and the version of debian i had for a client only had 3.1.12 - however amazingly HP's ready-to-go compilation script walked through the process of installing the prerequisites and got it all done. kinda impressive.
anyway so printing is not a problem. you are then going to *not* get him a chromebook, you're going to replace the OS (as someone else suggested) or you are going to sell the chromebook on ebay and get him a 200 quid Lenovo B30-50 from Tesco's or ebuyer.com or something similar (a big 15in 1366x768 LCD - awesome) - then you're going to install Debian GNU/Linux on that, too. setting up 3G dongles is really easy: remember to install the usbmodeswitch package. there is plenty of advice out there on setting up 3G dongles - remember to look up and set the correct APN settings in wvdial.conf (or whatever you end up using)
then, to make sure that he can print remotely, you're going to install a VPN on both devices (i recommend openvpn however tinc would do just as well and is slightly easier to set up) - both the ARM11 print server and the laptop, and you're going to either use the server that you're already maintaining, or you're going to ask a friend if you can put a VPN on their server, *or* you're going to get *another* of those ARM11 devices and send it to these guys:
http://raspberrycolocation.com...
basically for $EUR 36 per year they will host you an ARM11 device on a 100mbit/sec link. the power requirements and size are so small that it's perfectly feasible.
so that's what you're going to do... or not. it's a lot of work to set up, but if those are the requirements (remote printing access) then that's what needs to be done. it's going to be costly, however, as both the ARM11 device and the portable device will *both* need 3G connectivity.
honestly i can thoroughly recommend going a different route, as follows:
* go to a local three networks store and buy a Huawei MIFI (3G+WIFI gateway) device
* go to Maplin's and get a "mobile" 2-port WIFI router. i looked one up that could be re-flashed with OpenWRT.
* once the firmware is re-flashed on the "mobile" 2-port WIFI router, change it to be a *CLIENT* of the Huawei MIFI device.
* also set up the WIFI router to "bridge" mode (between the WIFI and the 2 ports: make them all on the same LAN space)
* plug the ARM11 device into one of the 2 LAN ports.
* associate the laptop with the MIFI's WIFI network as well
now you have the ARM11 device set up as a printer on the same (bridged) LAN as the WIFI devices, including the MIFI and the laptop. if you have installed OpenWRT as i suggest then you can also install the OpenWRT openvpn package on it (or tinc), and you then have 24x7 access to the systems on the network, and can manage them remotely *including* logging in to the ARM11 device and clearing out any stuck print jobs without needing to drive N+ miles.
this is what i have set up for a client (in one form or another). with this above 2nd scenario you are _still_ not going to get a chromebook, you're going to get a laptop with debian installed that you can actually manage (including remotely). the difference is that it'll be easier for your father because it will be internal WIFI, not a dangling external USB 3G modem. wicd-client is much easier to comprehend, i find, than the 3G management programs for GNU/Linux. err, there's WIFI networks and errr, there's a place where you press "connect" and errr that
you have two kinds of deployment situations: those that need to be in the field, and those that can remain back at a base (preferably outside of the country). i would question even the need for an army to *have* the second type of individual when they could just as easily have someone from e.g. the CIA or elsewhere be contracted in.
so that would leave the first group - hackers that could need to be deployed in the field. now, i don't know about you, but if i was an ordinary soldier, along-side someone who basically could not run 20 metres without getting out of breath, i would hardly have any respect for them. i would consider them to be a liability, unable to fend for themselves, and, much worse than that, such unfit individuals could potentially end up risking the lives of their fellow soldiers under combat situations.
and that's a real serious problem, right there. knowing that, i can say absolutely for sure that even aged 44 there is absolutely no way that i would wish to go into a warzone without the same kind of physical training that *all my peers* had been through. that training is *really* important. it's about letting *you* know what you can achieve, as well as the rest of your squad. everyone gets the same level of training, so that everyone knows that they can count on each other when it really matters.
and the US army *wants* to have hackers be ostracised, uncertain if they can get themselves out of physical danger, and be a risk to people around them. that sounds ... hmm, it sounds like a stereotypical hacker if i am absolutely honest! but having the US army make that even worse... hmmm...
... haaaa, veery interesting: wasn't there an article on slashdot very recently that said that yoga apparently is a better cardiovascular work-out than aerobic exercise? and wouldn't it be fascinating if yoga activated DNA in different [much more beneficial] ways from aerobic exercise. meditation [deep breathing included] is *also* a form of exercise. wouldn't it be fascinating to find that there are actual *real* physiological benefits - at the cellular level - to all this so-called "mumbo jumbo" spiritual guru "nonsense", and that it all had *real* measureable benefits that *really did* prolong your life?
" Drug companies cannot illegally prioritize profits over patients"
actually, it's not illegal, and in fact what the judge is doing is directly against the Articles of Incorporation of the Company. if this is something you're not familiar with, watch the first few minutes of the Documentary called "The Corporation" or read professor Yunus's book "Creating a World Without Poverty". basically it is a LEGAL REQUIREMENT that the Directors of Corporations enact - pathologically and absolutely - the Articles of Incorporation of a Company, otherwise they may either be faced with a vote by their shareholders to resign, or they may face jail time. ... and the Articles of Incorporation typically state that profit MUST be maximised to the absolute, total, complete, without fail absolute 100% top absolute top priority above all else WITHOUT fail.
so under the Articles of Incorporation of this Drug Company, saving lives is not a priority: making MONEY - the absolute maximum amount possible - is the absolute top priority.
so this judge's decision, therefore, was quite literally the only way by which those lives could be prioritised over and above the profits of the Corporation. you really should watch "The Documentary". its premise is that if a Corporation was a real person instead of a fictitous one, they give 10 reasons why that "person" would be locked up forever as pathologically and criminally insane. i no longer call Corporations "Corporations, i call them "Cancerations" because they pathologically consume all resources to further themselves with blatant disregard.
simple, really.
i had 9 of those smartphone / pocket-pc style devices back at the time: the absolute best one was the HTC Universal, as it was more like a hand-held clamshell laptop with built-in 3G. you _used_ to be able to get information about them on handhelds.org but we coordinated through #htc-linux (since taken over by android dummies) and used wiki.xda-developers.com (since taken over by android wannabe modders). [note to xda-developer forum users: i may be being slightly unfair though about the android dummies and wannabes: i apologise in advance to any of you that aren't so stupid as to be able to find and pay attention long enough to read slashdot :) ]
so you're going to have to dig... and you'll almost certainly need to begin with the 2.6 era linux kernel tree, which should give you a very very big hint about what you face, here. to give you an example: the fastest i've ever been able to reverse-engineer linux onto a device was 3 weeks and that was because it already had a [GPL-violating] linux kernel on it, where they had left some clues around and it was possible to poke around in /proc.
beyond that, the fastest i managed - and i could not get PM/wakeup to work because i could not locate the correct RAM/device re-initialisation parameters - was six to eight weeks on the HTC/Compaq Ipaq, i believe it was called the hw6915.
beyond _that_, the _longest_ i ever heard someone taking (and this was because it was worth it) to get full driver functionality was THREE YEARS, and that was for the HTC Universal (aka O2 "XDA III").
please please DO NOT underestimate how much work it takes to do reverse-engineering. these handhelds are actually far more complex pieces of kit, in engineering and in software terms, than any laptop or desktop PC you've ever encountered. the HTC Universal had SEVEN audio output paths for example, and over four audio input paths. there were over 110 GPIO pins on its Intel PXA ARM processor, but these were nowhere near enough, so they had to use an external GPIO IC (we called it ASIC3). but... they actually ran out of GPIO pins on that *as well*, so they ended up utilising the 16 pins of GPIO on the Ericsson 3G GSM modem (only contactable over USB!) in order to control some of the functions such as camera light.
so in many ways you are actually better off designing (and paying to have made) your own device. that is not a joke, in the slightest bit. it will take you less time and will cost you less in lost earnings from having to work full-time on the reverse-engineering. and before you splutter in disbelief, there are people who have done exactly that: Dr Schaeller did the GTA04 fairly recently (fits into a Neo FreeRunner case), and in that way he at least got to pick a) a modern-ish processor b) the best components that were available c) he got CONTROL OVER THE DEVICE DRIVERs, and he didn't have to _guess_ what the GPIO maps and memory maps are.
basically, what i'm trying to say is that if you cannot find a pre-existing project (you didn't mention what devices you actually have) that has done the reverse-engineering, unless you are actually thinking of learning reverse-engineering as a useful specialist marketable skill, either throw those devices into landfill, give them to someone who doesn't mind winceouch, or break them down for parts and sell the components on ebay. check beforehand to make sure that they're desirable parts of course.
of course... i say "throw them into landfill", which is directly and vehemently against our social responsibility, but unfortunately when actually buying these devices we make selfish decisions, not socially responsible ones, not least because they *aren't any alternatives*. now http://phonebloks.com/ is looking to change that in the smartphone space, and i'm looking to change that in the everything-else-device arena (starting here https://www.crowdsupply.com/eo...)
i feel that the answer lies in the sentence "the internet is driven by c". if you want direct performance, executable compactness as well as operational efficiency (that is also massive step up from assembly language), you have *one* option available to you: c. that means that apache, wine, postgresql, openldap, cups, samba, libc6, the python interpreter itself, the linux kernel, the windows NT kernel and many more OSes: they're written in c.
only when some of those constraints - performance, compactness and operational efficiency - may be relaxed in favour of, for example, a higher bang-per-buck ratio in the expressive power behind the lines of code written (python dict), or where code-resuse is critical without too much inconvenience (templates and objects of c++), *then* you begin to choose alternative programming languages.
but as a general rule, if ever you see the word "system" or "service" in a sentence (operating "system", web "service"), automatically that implies "high performance" which automatically implies "high efficiency needed" and that means "c".
so i feel it is therefore much more interesting to note the situations in businesses where c is *not* used despite there being circumstances where performance is critical. when people choose java for web services, for example.
Yes, I also have griped about SF that shoehorns the distant future into the mold of today, or of the past. I have special disdain for those who want to recreate the wild west, or the age of piracy, or empires of the past with space opera trappings. If you love the old west, write westerns, man!
in the turkey lexicon written by bruce sterling to help new sci-fi writers, there's a special phrase to describe the type of book where "laser pistol" replaces the word "six shooter" and "steed" replaces "six-legged mounted alien beast". it's called "The Western"!
http://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/tu...
there are many more: you are not alone in encountering badly-written sci-fi by novelists who quotes want to get in on the sci-fi genre act quote. but one that really really surprised me: a book in the "Eve Online" universe. it begins *literally* with the "White Room Syndrome" and i was like "OH NOOO! the white room syndrome!!" - that's where the main character wakes up in a white room, with only one (white) door, and no furniture, with no memory of past events, and it symbolises the author's own total lack of imagination at being able to begin the story even from page one - but i kept reading and found that, actually, there was a heck of a lot of good in it. it was the author's first and only book, and he was extremely brave to attempt it, and, apart from being semi-starwars-esque in places and "film-drama-queen-esque" in others, the story worked really _really_ well, kept my attention and made really good use of advanced biotech, cloning, machine consciousness, wormhole technology and much more to actually *tell a story*.
bruce sterling wrote an extremely funny and valuable guide to sci-fi writers which i've mentioned here before on slashdot, and it has been expanded ever since. ah yeah here we go: http://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/tu... it's well-worth reading just for amusement value. the ironical thing is that this well-known sci-fi author, charles stross, is telling us that many sci-fi authors today are falling into some of the traps outlined by that lexicon and valuable guide.
whilist it seems flippant therefore to be telling them "write better sci-fi!" it has to be said that sci-fi writers have set themselves a much harder task than any other writing genre. first and foremost: they need to be good story tellers! and almost secondary to that, they need to be extremely knowledgeable about technology... *because their readers are*. whenever i read a new sci-fi novel by an author that i've never heard of before - and i do not do that often because it is a risk - i often find myself critiquing the author's style. anything where they assume i am an idiot (by doing things like explaining cloud computing to me), that's when the magic of the story is lost, and i know i just read a story by someone who is not going to ever be a successful sci-fi writer. it's a fine line to walk.
" The kind of phone that only freakin' astronauts had in 1994." .... and only grandmothers and the *really* discerning geeks who have seen exactly the effects that the OP describes, and have decided to do something about it.
my advice on an old phone: get a nokia 6310i. that one is still amazing, and they sell out within an hour at market stalls. on a new phone: get a cheap PAYG nokia. they're still made, they now have a 30-day (30 DAY!!) standby, they still run the same OS as the 6310i (just upgraded to colour), and they're actually lighter. my partner has one, whilst i have a 3310.
i've taken up tennis in a big way: nearly every day now for over 20 months i do at least... something. i practice on a wall on days i don't have a regular partner, and when i remember i do the TM asanas routine (use google image search to find it) to counteract the intensity of the exercise i do. and drink a huge amount of water: i get through about a litre an hour. this is *important* because otherwise i find i really really suffer the next day (which shows in my inability to do the yoga, which is precisely why i do it, to check that my body's not full of toxins. as far as yoga's concerned: spirituality be buggered, i want to know if my body's ok!!)
but the reason why i took up tennis is not because it's physical exercise, it's because it's *complex* physical exercise, and, when played properly, also requires strategic thinking. i am training both left-handed and right-handed in order to make it more challenging, and also so as to be
then also i am eating marmite (high in B vitamins) without which i swear i become much more tired and unable to remeber things day-to-day. i'm also taking green-lipped mussel extract - the lower-priced stuff when i am low on funds and the really *really* good stuff (like this - http://teamfrezzor.com/truewis...) when i can afford it. without it, within days my knuckles start to ache and the arthritis in my right hip starts to be painful again.
the only other piece of advice i can give is that habits typically take between 30-40 days to break. for example smoking is *not* addictive in the ways that people think. nicotine only takes 36 hours to become addictive,.. and 36 hours to completely clear your system. the *psychological* addiction however - the craving to visit the same restaurants, bars and haunts [where others also happen to smoke].... *that's* what keeps people hooked.
this is really really important: anyone wishing to make a difference in the world really REALLY needs to read the book written by Professor Yunus, the joint winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Price, "Creating a World Without Poverty".
in his book, Professor Yunus describes how he naively studied Economics because he believed that he would be able to change his country's financial situation through studying first world economies. after graduation he set out just after one of the worst natural disasters his country had experienced and realised how completely pointless his studies had been. however he did not give up, and set out to work out what the problem actually was.
he learned that the poor are first and foremost incredibly resourceful... mostly because they have to. he also learned that many of them are, because there are no enforceable usury laws, permanently kept in debt to money-lenders. this shocked him so badly that once he freed an entire village from debt just from the small change in his wallet: something like $USD 15 was all it took to pay off a decade of usury.
what he discovered is that the gratitude of these people when freed from their former situation is immeasurable. the Grameen Bank doesn't have lawyers or debt collectors. the people that they lend money to are so GRATEFUL that they work non-stop to turn their lives around and pay off their loan. in fact, the repayment success rate is around NINETY EIGHT percent. it's so high that the *GRAMEEN BANK* considers it to be THEIR FAULT if one of their customers is ever in default. by contrast in the western world the default rate is 88%. i'll repeat that again in case it's not clear: only TWELVE PERCENT of creditors in the western world pay their debts on time, every time, and in full.
but the main reason why anyone wishing to help the emerging markets and the third world should read his book is because he patiently, with all the knowledge from his economics background, outlines why NGOs, Charity and the "Corporate Social Responsibility" clauses of standard profit-maximising Capitalist Corporations are all worse than doomed but are guaranteed to be ineffective at best and invariably seriously damaging and counter-productive.
right at the start of his book he outlines a surprising offer by Danone to work with him (follow his advice) to actually be effective. it was Professor Yunus's first experience of having been "under the microscope" of people with both big resources and heart. in other words the team at Danone were huge fans of what Yunus was trying to achieve: when he explained to them the financial structure that was needed, they listened, and they did it. they did not go in with a charity, or with donations: they set up a "non-loss, non-dividend" business, selling *locally-produced* yoghurt that happened to have the nutritients that the local population happened (by a not-coincidence) to be chronically deficient in.
the yohurt was sold not at a loss but at an affordable financially sustainable price because the focus was on remaining *stable*, not on exploitation through maximisation of profits: the focus was on allowing people to feel proud of what they achieved, and to take responsibility for their own wealth. they were EMPOWERED through the enormous generous resources of Danone's, but it was a successful venture because they LISTENED to what Professor Yunus had to say.
What are the possible choices for farmers?
1. grow crappy crops with free seeds and lots of expensive water,
2. grow good groups with seeds that you need to pay for but use less water?
#2 will make you more money, so the cost of the seeds is a non-factor. #1 will make you poor, because when it doesn't rain your crops die.
So, what exactly is the issue?
this is a completely wrong analysis. if (2) was true those people would have been dead centuries or millenia ago. the fact that they are still alive tells you that they get by, and that, honestly, is good enough.
there was an attempt a few decades ago to do exactly what DuPont is doing [again]. i do not understand why 1st world countries do not leave the 3rd world alone to grow their own food. 1st world conditions are NOT THE SAME as 3rd world conditions.
the study that i heard about was exactly the same situation. a 3rd world country which had extremely poor yields was interfered with by a 1st world country providing donations of high-yield maize. for three to four years the success of the trials resulted in bumper crops and the surrounding farmers clambered onto the 1st world genetic variety maize.
then there was a drought.
the high-yield 1st world maize died, and the entire area went into famine. next year, because nothing had grown, nobody had any food the year after, either.
basically it turned out that the low-yield maize had a MASSIVE genetic diversity. some variants thrived in good conditions, some grew successfully *EVEN IN DROUGHT CONDITIONS*. no matter what happened, those people always got some food. not necessarily a lot, but enough so that they didn't die.
now the problem was with this stupid, stupid interference by a 1st world country was that because everyone in the area had converted over to this wonderful high-yield maize, NOBODY HAD ANY OF THE OLD GENETIC VARIETY LEFT.
it was a decade before the country properly recovered, and that was just from one drought.
so the conclusion is, unescapably, that DuPont is intent on killing people just to make a profit, as this isn't the first time that providing 1st world maize to 3rd world countries has gone very very wrong.
just leave them alone. we *DON'T* know better.
this is pure speculation here, but my guess is that the people (politicians) protesting this research are quite likely to be the ones in charge of classified funding efforts for military, espionage and CIA equivalent research... and deployment of those same tools. if you've ever read Neal Stephenson's book "Cobweb" you'll know exactly what is most likely to be going on.
so, in essence, those people (politicians) know damn well that the espionage, domestic and political manipulation tools that they funded are quite likely to show up as anomalous activity should there ever be any tools (such as Truthy) provided to the general public, or any kind of research done to ascertain which "memes" *should* spread and which should not. for if there is anything that is detected which is *different* from normal expectations (a meme spread when it shouldn't have, and oh incidentally what was the source of that disruptive influence again?) it's really not going to go down too well with the people who *already* manipulate us from the shadows.
so i think you'll find that the people (politicians) protesting most loudly are the ones who are using media manipulation tools, and they're afraid that this research will be used to identify them, basically.
yes, i definitely have a question. i heard the statistic that the concentration of heavy and rare earth metals is now *higher* in landfill sites than it is in the original mines that they came from, which, if true, is a global disgrace for which all of us are responsible. firstly, is this actually true, and secondly, is anyone doing anything about the extraction of rare earth metals from the electronics in which they were originally embedded?