Exercise every day or two, eat well, go to the library to study, unplug your network connection, enrich yourself with essays and articles you find interesting, and do creative things (paint, write, draw, whatever).
Being an effective worker has mainly to do with what you don't do when you are working because there's much less separation between the "personal" and the "work" spheres than people seem to think.
As a fellow bike-geek (who just rode from SF to Chicago on an aluminum frame), I completely agree.
The only reason I haven't gone to steel is money -- I bought my bike before I knew what I know now about materials.
I think this bamboo bike is really neat and really cool. Where I think it could take off is the cheap, replaceable commuter bike market.
But like aluminum, titanium, and carbon fiber, bamboo seems like it would be a bitch to fix if splintered the material or cracked it somehow, not unlike the problems with cracking and breaking of the above mentioned metals.
I love fixies -- I'm in the process of building myself one. But, would a bamboo fixie cause more strain in the wrong directions? I rode a fixed gear once with a homemade rear hub built out of a standard hub with a free wheel and all and the rear gear was always breaking loose and eventually the hub broke down because backpedaling is a very straining activity.
Of course, I and every single one of my friends who bikes on a regular basis has had to go to the hospital because they've been hit by a car and the driver was at fault. I was hit, rolled up the hood, smashed into the windshield, and was thrown to the pavement when someone ran a red light and wound up spending the morning in the ER. Another time, my feet were run over when a car intentionally pinned me in. My girlfriend almost got killed by a van which tried to run her off the road. Another friend was knocked unconscious by someone who threw their door open without looking.
Recently, the city settled out of court in a lawsuit where an elderly black man (in his 60s) without drugs, weapons, or any malicious intent was intentionally hit by a police car while riding his bike.
One of the protest aspects of Critical Mass is to protest the interference of cars in the lives of cyclists when the law states that cars and bicycles must share the road. A statement is needed precisely because drivers are so careless and malicious towards cyclists.
As a sidenote, every time Critical Mass has taken over Lake Shore, the bikes are slowed down by the cars. Traffic around downtown Chicago at rush hour is so slow that bikes have a greater average speed. I'd guess that the amount of time that you lost was minimal.
It sounds like you think annoying angry, rich, impatient people is and end in itself. It certainly doesn't sound like a strategy for persuading people to cycle.
I do think that annoying angry, rich, impatient people is an end in itself, and does help persuade un-angry, un-rich, and patient people to cycle, even if it doesn't persuade the yuppies.
Make a statement about what? That you don't care about inconveniencing others and you've time on your hands?
A statement about our society's ridiculous reliance on cars, particularly in the city where bicycles are a much faster, healthier form of transportation.
It's important to remember that the people who get pissed off at Critical Mass tend to be: a) white, b) in affluent neighborhoods. In downtown Chicago, traffic is so slow that it doesn't make a difference. In poor neighborhoods and hispanic, Asian, and black neighborhoods, people come out a cheer for Critical Mass or join in and Critical Massers stop and chat with folks.
By and large, the only people who are being inconvenienced are angry, rich, impatient people.
Anyway, CM never ever spends more than a quarter mile or so on any given street precisely so that cars can continue on their way and the riders in Chicago always tell people "thank you for waiting," and things like that.
People who think that this is a big disruption should need to reconsider their priorities and values, I think.
All over the world, there's been a movement called Critical Mass that gets folks together to take over the streets on bike rides on a semi-regular basis. Here in Chicago, it's been really successful -- hundreds go on the main ride every month, even in the dead of winter. In the summer months, there have been around a thousand riders. Critical Mass is a sort of anarchic protest against the domination of our streets by cars but without a specific, directed agenda. The idea is that having fun and taking over streets, no matter what one's political orientation is, is a good way to make a statement.
What's interesting is that now that almost everybody has some direct connection to the Net, Critical Mass rides are getting organized overnight. When the war in Iraq broke out, the next day a group of Critical Massers against the war (not all CM folks are) organized a very effective ride within a half a day and people have been now talking about organizing within a few hours. I have to wonder about flash crowds becoming flash protests or flash rides and what the potential benefits and problems of this will be.
Speaking of which, this effect also happened in the South Korean election recently in a close race.
I like to put all my code, all my references to media assets, all my databases calls in a text file and edit it in my favorite editor. Doesn't it seem a little less than elegant to be putting bastardized ECMAScript in a frame of a propriety file format and using an timeline interface for writing an application?
Further, the output to the screen isn't the issues -- it's the way it's delivered. That was my point. Flash's output would be roughly equivalent to the SVG solution. It's the difference in the ease and flexibility of creation, as well as the ability to be straight open-source the whole way, that makes the crucial difference.
You obviously haven't tried to write a data-driven visualization app in Flash.
Gord is precisely correct. I find Flash's implementation of ECMAScript very goofy. You wind up setting up layers upon layers and frames upon frames of images, vector graphics, etc, making them all invisible, and then hiding code in lots of different places on the time line and man, it's a big mess. Of course, the Flash community loves it to death at this point because it is what they now know deeply. And, especially with the MX version, can do some very cool things when it comes to interactivity online. But it is tricky and complicated to make it dynamic, work with one's databases, it is still tricky to print, etc. I've done some Flash development, and I just keep asking myself: why can't I just write straight code?
What's important to note is that visualization of data isn't just dynamically generated graphs and reports for the corporate newsletter. Another promise of end-to-end, data-driven graphics is in creative and interesting mapping of web site relations, big statistical datasets, etc.
Currently, I'm exploring the possibility of using SVG sometime this fall or early next year to visualize connections between news stories: how are the people in Story A related to the people in Story B and how are the themes of Story C related to the themes of Story D and how can it be visualized in a way that the connections between a large number of documents pops out immediately. For the moment, we're just looking at doing it on the site that I develop, but there are possibilities for doing it more generally -- i.e. comparing the NYT's coverage of Iraq with the Washington Post's.
The point is, you can do this in Flash, but the level of complication makes it far from the ideal way to accomplish the task. Further, you can't very well GPL the resultant application, which is precisely what a concerned citizen might want to do with a tool that aids in the scrutiny of media or in seeing large scale statistical trends in the Chicago Police Department that could uncover corruption and deceit, just to give some really innocent examples that occur to me as I write it.
Honestly, though, the possibilities are so significant that even without built-in browser support SVG is a pretty big thing.
The Tim Schaeffer LucasArts games could be made into very interesting movies. Day Of The Tentacle, Monkey Island, and a few others might be way too oddball for mass appeal, but Full Throttle and Grim Fandango might not be.
What they have going for them is that the game worlds are superbly realized and the adventure game form is cinematic. There are RTS and turn-based strategy games with superbly realized game worlds, but the art form isn't as amenable to cinema.
Can somebody make Grim Fandango into a movie? Can they use the Pixar CG team?
Are the market dynamics of the game industry such that if a bill was passed that put a lower limit on the age for buying games, would it actually encourage more pornographic content beyond violence? If the buyer must be 18 anyway, it would not be illegal for them to view naked bodies, sexual acts, etc, at least in most states in the US.
For the record, this is a list of 85 business breakthroughs. People forget, especially in the gadget happy world of Slashdot, that some of the great historical inventions and innovations are theoretical and intellectual and first exist in the realm of ideas and aren't clearly profitable or worth, by objective measures, an investment of money. Forbes wants you to think about breakthrough because they have the potential to make profit, which is good because it spurs innovation. But there are other reasons to try to innovate and revolutionize that are outside of the world of consumer culture.
Honestly folks, it's really F = dp/dt that kills, along with an accounting for friction. You need a change in momentum to impart the force and to carry out the transfer of energy and the conversion of the energy into heat contributes a great deal as well.
...are a lot like the problems and advantages of Microsoft's products. Mathematica is slow and bloated, but it's also easy and trusted. There are a ton of undergrads who know Mathematica and like it because of the symbolic interface. Any open source competitor needs to have a symbolic interface on par with Mathematica to compete because one of the reasons that gridMathematica may take off is precisely because there will be a lot of undergrads coming to grad school who won't want to program C++ or using the numerical Python module and just want to click sigma and do an infinite sum. Or, in this case, come up with something complicated and click "Solve on the grid" and it will Mathemagically do it, albeit slowly. As someone else said, gridMathematica could reduce a lot of the trouble for smaller universities to get a high powered computing set up, even if there is a ding in speed.
I think, pedagogically, it is actually better to start making your students program, say with VPython (which is easy as pie) and looking through numerical methods books to find a needed numerical method because it really dissects the guts of a math or physics problem better. You have to think about the error term, step sizes, singularities, processing time, etc, rather than just clicking solve in Mathematica.
But that doesn't matter: the more people are used to the Mathematica interface, the more this will catch on.
There've been a lot of Star Wars spin offs and related items (books, video games, etc) that contradict or alter the details of the movies. How could it really make a big difference? These little pop-culture universes are malleable, just like any sort of folk-lore.
Here's something that the article left out: can Linux utilize hyperthreading on Intel processors? When HT is enabled, does the hardware do all the work of making the OS know it has "two" processors to work with?
Apparently since everybody's kvetching without having read Tom's review and benchmarks, the gaming performance and rendering performance is good but what you'd expect -- hyperthreading doesn't have a big effect. But the lab video shows what I wanted to see -- that HT could have some benefit in a production environment. I'm regularly simultanteously running PHP, Coldfusion, MySQL, Apache, Photoshop, a couple of editors, Mathematica for homework, and lately a couple of video editing/encoding programs as well. It looks like HT will improve performance for this sort of an environment.
It seems that unless your rendering package/game/other computationally intensive application is written to take advantage of hyperthreading, you won't get a big performance gain running that app all by itself, but that's not the point.
The article is unclear about who exactly broke into the system. Anybody know more?
Also, could this not be a case of security being intentionally lax in one area to serve as a distraction, if not to more or less astute intelligence agencies then to the public and press, which skip the real intelligence to focus on emails to who-knows-who in the Iraqi government from who-knows-who anywhere else.
The level of nastiness that this post has generated is very disappointing. There are some silly comments in the slapdash story, especially the comment about closed and non-free software being inferior because it is less transparent. Mathematica, MatLab and the like should all be independently verifable simply by the inputs and results and also by the inclusion of results of those programs in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
The point of the article, which would be a better point of debate, is that data collection and analysis by human rights organizations benefits from free software.
What free software provides human rights folks is a platform for doing specific kinds of work and letting a community improve that platform.
Here's a personal example: I'm developing a web based research and reporting system to track people who are kicked out of their HUD apartments for a drug or alcohol related arrest (not conviction) under the crazy One Strike law. We're both using free and open source tools and will, upon release in the near future, release this thing as quite modest free software.
The advantage is pragmatic: I can create a sophisticated system that other people can use to gather their own data on this subject and share/compare with ours. Are there nationwide trends and implications for this law beyond Chicago, the city where I work? Are there methods for analyzing this data that we're missing? Do other locales have specific pieces of information that we don't need to worry about in Chicago? Free software makes these questions easier to answer than proprietary software. Most of the mathematics required is stuff that any undergrad with numerical methods and statistical analysis under his or her belt can easily code, so that isn't really any issue.
It's a shame that the discussion on Slashdot thus far has been so hasty and angry, because even if it's a flawed article, it should really make people how they connect the "nerd" part of Slashdot with the "stuff that matters" part.
Assuming that you have a network connection, a solution that could run on many operating systems and be very effective would be to install a web server/database combination (like LAMP) and view with a browser that runs in full-screen/near-full-screen mode.
A simple web design could put your image in the frame's viewing area and hide any OS-junk. With a few scripts in a language like ColdFusion or PHP connected to a database of images, one could easily create a picture frame server. Upload an image to the correct directory via FTP and it gets put in the display queue automatically. Use META REFRESH tags or some other reload method to cycle through images.
It would be easy and free to use ColdFusion with Apache and MySQL or some other database to make this all happen. There are single IP developer versions of the ColdFusion 5 and MX server available at Macromedia's website. Either of these would be enough to set up an image server really quickly with the caveat that ColdFusion 5 is way more stable on Linux than ColdFusion MX. Because you can simply upload to the server via FTP, the single IP limitation isn't so bad. On the other hand, if you already know something like PHP, that might be the way to go.
One question that I have is this: would be possible to cut up a keyboard and attach new buttons to it that could be mounted on the front and back of the frame and could allow the OS to be rebooted?
If that's possible, then another advantage of using a browser would be image control. Because Javascript can log keystrokes and then do things. Because you get to pick which browser the system runs on, you don't have to worry about compatibility and accessibility issues. Forward and back buttons mapped to any keys on the keyboard could control the image and those buttons could be mounted on the frame.
Finally, to respond to the digital divide comment: I work in Chicago's public housing projects (the poorest neighborhood in America) and I've given lots of computers to residents of the development where I work. Honestly, nobody needs or wants a Duo 280c. A good activist and hacker should continue to have fun making and hacking and breaking things while being generous and helping others. Things like this aren't excessive or selfish as much as creative gestures that show that it's people who should be the ultimate beneficiaries of technology.
Slashdot Mirror
Exercise every day or two, eat well, go to the library to study, unplug your network connection, enrich yourself with essays and articles you find interesting, and do creative things (paint, write, draw, whatever).
Being an effective worker has mainly to do with what you don't do when you are working because there's much less separation between the "personal" and the "work" spheres than people seem to think.
But I'm talking about the stress on the frame from backpedaling.
As a fellow bike-geek (who just rode from SF to Chicago on an aluminum frame), I completely agree.
The only reason I haven't gone to steel is money -- I bought my bike before I knew what I know now about materials.
I think this bamboo bike is really neat and really cool. Where I think it could take off is the cheap, replaceable commuter bike market.
But like aluminum, titanium, and carbon fiber, bamboo seems like it would be a bitch to fix if splintered the material or cracked it somehow, not unlike the problems with cracking and breaking of the above mentioned metals.
I love fixies -- I'm in the process of building myself one. But, would a bamboo fixie cause more strain in the wrong directions? I rode a fixed gear once with a homemade rear hub built out of a standard hub with a free wheel and all and the rear gear was always breaking loose and eventually the hub broke down because backpedaling is a very straining activity.
Of course, I and every single one of my friends who bikes on a regular basis has had to go to the hospital because they've been hit by a car and the driver was at fault. I was hit, rolled up the hood, smashed into the windshield, and was thrown to the pavement when someone ran a red light and wound up spending the morning in the ER. Another time, my feet were run over when a car intentionally pinned me in. My girlfriend almost got killed by a van which tried to run her off the road. Another friend was knocked unconscious by someone who threw their door open without looking.
Recently, the city settled out of court in a lawsuit where an elderly black man (in his 60s) without drugs, weapons, or any malicious intent was intentionally hit by a police car while riding his bike.
One of the protest aspects of Critical Mass is to protest the interference of cars in the lives of cyclists when the law states that cars and bicycles must share the road. A statement is needed precisely because drivers are so careless and malicious towards cyclists.
As a sidenote, every time Critical Mass has taken over Lake Shore, the bikes are slowed down by the cars. Traffic around downtown Chicago at rush hour is so slow that bikes have a greater average speed. I'd guess that the amount of time that you lost was minimal.
I do think that annoying angry, rich, impatient people is an end in itself, and does help persuade un-angry, un-rich, and patient people to cycle, even if it doesn't persuade the yuppies.
A statement about our society's ridiculous reliance on cars, particularly in the city where bicycles are a much faster, healthier form of transportation.
It's important to remember that the people who get pissed off at Critical Mass tend to be: a) white, b) in affluent neighborhoods. In downtown Chicago, traffic is so slow that it doesn't make a difference. In poor neighborhoods and hispanic, Asian, and black neighborhoods, people come out a cheer for Critical Mass or join in and Critical Massers stop and chat with folks.
By and large, the only people who are being inconvenienced are angry, rich, impatient people.
Anyway, CM never ever spends more than a quarter mile or so on any given street precisely so that cars can continue on their way and the riders in Chicago always tell people "thank you for waiting," and things like that.
People who think that this is a big disruption should need to reconsider their priorities and values, I think.
All over the world, there's been a movement called Critical Mass that gets folks together to take over the streets on bike rides on a semi-regular basis. Here in Chicago, it's been really successful -- hundreds go on the main ride every month, even in the dead of winter. In the summer months, there have been around a thousand riders. Critical Mass is a sort of anarchic protest against the domination of our streets by cars but without a specific, directed agenda. The idea is that having fun and taking over streets, no matter what one's political orientation is, is a good way to make a statement. What's interesting is that now that almost everybody has some direct connection to the Net, Critical Mass rides are getting organized overnight. When the war in Iraq broke out, the next day a group of Critical Massers against the war (not all CM folks are) organized a very effective ride within a half a day and people have been now talking about organizing within a few hours. I have to wonder about flash crowds becoming flash protests or flash rides and what the potential benefits and problems of this will be. Speaking of which, this effect also happened in the South Korean election recently in a close race.
I like to put all my code, all my references to media assets, all my databases calls in a text file and edit it in my favorite editor. Doesn't it seem a little less than elegant to be putting bastardized ECMAScript in a frame of a propriety file format and using an timeline interface for writing an application?
Further, the output to the screen isn't the issues -- it's the way it's delivered. That was my point. Flash's output would be roughly equivalent to the SVG solution. It's the difference in the ease and flexibility of creation, as well as the ability to be straight open-source the whole way, that makes the crucial difference.
You obviously haven't tried to write a data-driven visualization app in Flash.
Gord is precisely correct. I find Flash's implementation of ECMAScript very goofy. You wind up setting up layers upon layers and frames upon frames of images, vector graphics, etc, making them all invisible, and then hiding code in lots of different places on the time line and man, it's a big mess. Of course, the Flash community loves it to death at this point because it is what they now know deeply. And, especially with the MX version, can do some very cool things when it comes to interactivity online. But it is tricky and complicated to make it dynamic, work with one's databases, it is still tricky to print, etc. I've done some Flash development, and I just keep asking myself: why can't I just write straight code?
What's important to note is that visualization of data isn't just dynamically generated graphs and reports for the corporate newsletter. Another promise of end-to-end, data-driven graphics is in creative and interesting mapping of web site relations, big statistical datasets, etc.
Currently, I'm exploring the possibility of using SVG sometime this fall or early next year to visualize connections between news stories: how are the people in Story A related to the people in Story B and how are the themes of Story C related to the themes of Story D and how can it be visualized in a way that the connections between a large number of documents pops out immediately. For the moment, we're just looking at doing it on the site that I develop, but there are possibilities for doing it more generally -- i.e. comparing the NYT's coverage of Iraq with the Washington Post's.
The point is, you can do this in Flash, but the level of complication makes it far from the ideal way to accomplish the task. Further, you can't very well GPL the resultant application, which is precisely what a concerned citizen might want to do with a tool that aids in the scrutiny of media or in seeing large scale statistical trends in the Chicago Police Department that could uncover corruption and deceit, just to give some really innocent examples that occur to me as I write it.
Honestly, though, the possibilities are so significant that even without built-in browser support SVG is a pretty big thing.
The Tim Schaeffer LucasArts games could be made into very interesting movies. Day Of The Tentacle, Monkey Island, and a few others might be way too oddball for mass appeal, but Full Throttle and Grim Fandango might not be.
What they have going for them is that the game worlds are superbly realized and the adventure game form is cinematic. There are RTS and turn-based strategy games with superbly realized game worlds, but the art form isn't as amenable to cinema.
Can somebody make Grim Fandango into a movie? Can they use the Pixar CG team?
Are the market dynamics of the game industry such that if a bill was passed that put a lower limit on the age for buying games, would it actually encourage more pornographic content beyond violence? If the buyer must be 18 anyway, it would not be illegal for them to view naked bodies, sexual acts, etc, at least in most states in the US.
It was, but whoever posted the submission changed a couple key words.
For the record, this is a list of 85 business breakthroughs. People forget, especially in the gadget happy world of Slashdot, that some of the great historical inventions and innovations are theoretical and intellectual and first exist in the realm of ideas and aren't clearly profitable or worth, by objective measures, an investment of money. Forbes wants you to think about breakthrough because they have the potential to make profit, which is good because it spurs innovation. But there are other reasons to try to innovate and revolutionize that are outside of the world of consumer culture.
Fight the national One-strike law for public housing residents
Honestly folks, it's really F = dp/dt that kills, along with an accounting for friction. You need a change in momentum to impart the force and to carry out the transfer of energy and the conversion of the energy into heat contributes a great deal as well.
...are a lot like the problems and advantages of Microsoft's products. Mathematica is slow and bloated, but it's also easy and trusted. There are a ton of undergrads who know Mathematica and like it because of the symbolic interface. Any open source competitor needs to have a symbolic interface on par with Mathematica to compete because one of the reasons that gridMathematica may take off is precisely because there will be a lot of undergrads coming to grad school who won't want to program C++ or using the numerical Python module and just want to click sigma and do an infinite sum. Or, in this case, come up with something complicated and click "Solve on the grid" and it will Mathemagically do it, albeit slowly. As someone else said, gridMathematica could reduce a lot of the trouble for smaller universities to get a high powered computing set up, even if there is a ding in speed.
I think, pedagogically, it is actually better to start making your students program, say with VPython (which is easy as pie) and looking through numerical methods books to find a needed numerical method because it really dissects the guts of a math or physics problem better. You have to think about the error term, step sizes, singularities, processing time, etc, rather than just clicking solve in Mathematica.
But that doesn't matter: the more people are used to the Mathematica interface, the more this will catch on.
Fight the national One-Strike law!
There've been a lot of Star Wars spin offs and related items (books, video games, etc) that contradict or alter the details of the movies. How could it really make a big difference? These little pop-culture universes are malleable, just like any sort of folk-lore.
Here's something that the article left out: can Linux utilize hyperthreading on Intel processors? When HT is enabled, does the hardware do all the work of making the OS know it has "two" processors to work with?
Apparently since everybody's kvetching without having read Tom's review and benchmarks, the gaming performance and rendering performance is good but what you'd expect -- hyperthreading doesn't have a big effect. But the lab video shows what I wanted to see -- that HT could have some benefit in a production environment. I'm regularly simultanteously running PHP, Coldfusion, MySQL, Apache, Photoshop, a couple of editors, Mathematica for homework, and lately a couple of video editing/encoding programs as well. It looks like HT will improve performance for this sort of an environment.
It seems that unless your rendering package/game/other computationally intensive application is written to take advantage of hyperthreading, you won't get a big performance gain running that app all by itself, but that's not the point.
The article is unclear about who exactly broke into the system. Anybody know more?
Also, could this not be a case of security being intentionally lax in one area to serve as a distraction, if not to more or less astute intelligence agencies then to the public and press, which skip the real intelligence to focus on emails to who-knows-who in the Iraqi government from who-knows-who anywhere else.
The level of nastiness that this post has generated is very disappointing. There are some silly comments in the slapdash story, especially the comment about closed and non-free software being inferior because it is less transparent. Mathematica, MatLab and the like should all be independently verifable simply by the inputs and results and also by the inclusion of results of those programs in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
The point of the article, which would be a better point of debate, is that data collection and analysis by human rights organizations benefits from free software.
What free software provides human rights folks is a platform for doing specific kinds of work and letting a community improve that platform.
Here's a personal example: I'm developing a web based research and reporting system to track people who are kicked out of their HUD apartments for a drug or alcohol related arrest (not conviction) under the crazy One Strike law. We're both using free and open source tools and will, upon release in the near future, release this thing as quite modest free software.
The advantage is pragmatic: I can create a sophisticated system that other people can use to gather their own data on this subject and share/compare with ours. Are there nationwide trends and implications for this law beyond Chicago, the city where I work? Are there methods for analyzing this data that we're missing? Do other locales have specific pieces of information that we don't need to worry about in Chicago? Free software makes these questions easier to answer than proprietary software. Most of the mathematics required is stuff that any undergrad with numerical methods and statistical analysis under his or her belt can easily code, so that isn't really any issue.
It's a shame that the discussion on Slashdot thus far has been so hasty and angry, because even if it's a flawed article, it should really make people how they connect the "nerd" part of Slashdot with the "stuff that matters" part.
Assuming that you have a network connection, a solution that could run on many operating systems and be very effective would be to install a web server/database combination (like LAMP) and view with a browser that runs in full-screen/near-full-screen mode.
A simple web design could put your image in the frame's viewing area and hide any OS-junk. With a few scripts in a language like ColdFusion or PHP connected to a database of images, one could easily create a picture frame server. Upload an image to the correct directory via FTP and it gets put in the display queue automatically. Use META REFRESH tags or some other reload method to cycle through images.
It would be easy and free to use ColdFusion with Apache and MySQL or some other database to make this all happen. There are single IP developer versions of the ColdFusion 5 and MX server available at Macromedia's website. Either of these would be enough to set up an image server really quickly with the caveat that ColdFusion 5 is way more stable on Linux than ColdFusion MX. Because you can simply upload to the server via FTP, the single IP limitation isn't so bad. On the other hand, if you already know something like PHP, that might be the way to go.
One question that I have is this: would be possible to cut up a keyboard and attach new buttons to it that could be mounted on the front and back of the frame and could allow the OS to be rebooted?
If that's possible, then another advantage of using a browser would be image control. Because Javascript can log keystrokes and then do things. Because you get to pick which browser the system runs on, you don't have to worry about compatibility and accessibility issues. Forward and back buttons mapped to any keys on the keyboard could control the image and those buttons could be mounted on the frame.
Finally, to respond to the digital divide comment: I work in Chicago's public housing projects (the poorest neighborhood in America) and I've given lots of computers to residents of the development where I work. Honestly, nobody needs or wants a Duo 280c. A good activist and hacker should continue to have fun making and hacking and breaking things while being generous and helping others. Things like this aren't excessive or selfish as much as creative gestures that show that it's people who should be the ultimate beneficiaries of technology.