Yeah, right on - the accuracy, utility and soundness of God's word is why we now have television, cellphones, wireless networks, computers, the Internet, the telephone system, automobiles, passenger aircraft, video-conferencing, remotely piloted vehicles on Mars, gastro-enteroscopy, pacemakers, kidney dialysis machines, spectacles, contact lenses, anti-inflammatories, the polio vaccine, etc etc. People built all those things and more thanks to the detailed explanations of how our world works that is laid out in the Bible! Definitely better to not trust scientists, whose painstaking methodologies have not created any benefits or advancements whatsoever in our understanding of the Universe over the last 2000 years.
Oh, a small hint: read up about what the scientific method is, because you clearly don't even understand it. It's always better to actually understand something before you criticize it.
And of course the First Nazi Party also used the excuse that Jews were "potential terrorists" to enrage the German populace
It's also a page right out of the old South African apartheid government's book - all freedom fighters or activists were labelled "terrorists" and portrayed as such in the state-controlled media, to maintain white voter support for the oppression of blacks. They spun and wove fear that those 'evil terrorists' (who really were freedom fighters) would take over and destroy everything if they didn't continue the violent oppression, but of course this only made the cycle of violence inevitably spiral higher and higher (until SA got really lucky with De Klerk and Mandela).
Um, where's the hype in question? You just summarised the Wired article, which also states quite clearly, just as you did, that they've only demonstrated this in a computer simulation and a petri dish. I did not get any new information or even 'slant' from your post over and above the Wired article.
Grow up man.. for god's sake, just go and look up the meaning of the word "troll". It's not a troll just because it might be wrong. Seems people here have developed some sort of knee-jerk "troll" reaction to anything they're even vaguely in disagreement with.
And what, you think they're doing breathalizer tests to make sure that every person who signs up is sober at the time they do? Puh-lease. It's a club, half of these people are already drunk. Sure, it's not quite "waking up with an RFID tag in your arm", but it's definitely not going to be sober, rational decision-making all round as you imply.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic here (don't know the Outlook side), but Office 2003 was mostly just a facelist for Office XP. Do you know how many people really think that the new version is very different just because they made it look different? It's idiotic. Conversely, they could have added tonnes of new features, and if they had left the look and feel the same, same idiots would then think that nothing had changed. Software developers virtually have to change the look and feel of new versions of their software, just to fool users into thinking they're getting some "major" new thing. Just plain psychology.
Odd, I thought that the idea of "Office 2004" sounded ridiculous simply because MS only just released Office 2003 last year, which is anyway scarcely more than a patch for Office XP. They have almost never released new versions of any major product less than 2 or 3 years apart, the chances seem pretty slim of a "Word 2004" this early in 2004 already, even a beta.
In any case, anyone with any sense would have checked Microsoft's own site first to see if this thing even existed. Especially since it sounds suspicious to begin with. But then maybe Mac users really are just so shielded from the world of trojans/viruses etc that they are just naive. Like an immune system that's been protected from exposure to bacteria for ten or twenty years, or a species that has been living in a threat-free paradise for too long. Sounds very much like Darwinism.
Please, detail these closed-source disasters for us.
Hmm.... well, I can't seem to get Puyo Puyo to run on Windows XP!
Seriously though, with relation to BitKeeper, if you RTA he mentions that there is a "BK2CVS gateway", which will automatically export your BK repository (with history) to a CVS database nightly. So if BK disappears, NO PROBLEM. That also ensures that they (BK) have no meaningful incentive to pull a bait-n-switch and hold your data to ransom.
Where do you draw the line? It's a slippery slope. One of the most commonly used protocols by far for illegal copying is Microsoft Windows file-sharing (otherwise known as SMB). So by your reasoning, if we can hold the author of a p2p system liable, then we ABSOLUTELY MUST also hold Microsoft liable when it happens on their systems. Or do you have some magic, objective point at which you can draw the line and say "this file-sharing tool good, that one bad"? Sorry, but you have to either deem file-sharing tools ALL ILLEGAL, or ALL LEGAL. And yeah yeah I know that SMB is used in legal ways too, but so are all file-sharing tools.
Was nobody paying attention when Rumsfeld, Gen. Myers and the other Pentagon brass were testifying?
Indeed, the comments here are disturbing, especially if one contemplates that people who comment here that they "thought they read that dose pichas were actually from some porn shoot in LA or sumthing" (at least a day AFTER Rumsfeld publicly stated that the pictures were real and only the tip of the iceberg) are also people who have the power to vote in November. It's as if freedom of the press probably doesn't even matter to a large portion of the population, because they aren't paying attention anyway. Surely one should be expected to have even a tiny clue about what is happening in the real world before making such important decisions.. *sigh*.
However, we have to keep in mind that the scope of the problem is very limited to a few people who took part in this whole prison thing.
But the rest of the world has no way of knowing the true scope of this, because the US refuses to let anyone monitor what is going in any of the other prisons (e.g. in Cuba, Afghanistan and others in Iraq). And quite frankly the fact that the US refuses to let anyone monitor what is happening makes it seem extremely likely that this sort of stuff is endemic. If not, then what is the US trying to hid in all those other prisons? Why not let monitors in if they're not committing war crimes in there?
Up until the release of these pics, most of the rest of the world could still give the US the benefit of the doubt, and say well maybe they're not doing anything bad. But with the release of these pics, that is gone, and there is absolutely no reason to take the US's word anymore that they're not committing war crimes everywhere. There is no credibility left, the chances seem pretty slim that this was an isolated incident.
Actually there are at least two murder investigations under way. At least three prisoners died, and the medical examiners ruled two of the three deaths to be homicides.
Well, you're right about one thing: that was a dumb question. Do some reading, learn a little about what it's really about, learn a little about the implications of this.
I guess you aren't paying much attention then. Rumsfeld has been all over the news stating that the photos are not only real, but that there are far worse very brutal pictures that have not been publicly released. There are also at least two prisoners who were murdered, with two homicide investigations under way.
a start menu, taskbar, the same print dialogs, a "Control Center," Minimize/Maximize/Close buttons
None of those are Microsoft wheels you know. Let's stick to facts and not rewrite history here. Apple copied those wheels from Xerox Parc long before they were a twinkling in Bill Gates eyes, while other-mentioned (e.g. "start menu") already existed on some Unix systems.
However I have to agree with you. Linux developers spend way too much time copying stupid things from Windows, rather than just building something better by just thinking about it.
Well since this whole thing reads like a damn ad, perhaps HP sponsored it. or maybe they should... corporations sponsor expenses of space travel in exchange for good exposure?
Microsoft have spent the last thirty odd years re-inventing thousands of wheels that weren't theirs. Everything they have ever made has been a re-invention of someone else's wheel. It doesn't matter. Most people will use XAML just because it's Microsoft's, and it quite frankly has no relevance that others have done the same thing before, regardless of which one is technologically better too. Thus some or other XAML compatible extension to Firefox that allowed people to use it for XAML applications might be useful for Mozilla? And if enough people used Firefox for XAML, MS would have less power to pull 'embrace and extend' (hmm.. on their own spec? sounds a bit odd but the idea is that if enough customers used open implementations of MS standards, MS would have less power to modify the standards to enhance lock-in - breaking the standards in later versions might actually push corps away from MS and towards Firefox for those who are using, um, "Open XAML"). Basically the idea is to pull the inverse of MS's usual "embrace and extend" strategy. Instead of MS taking an open standard and introducing proprietary extensions, you take an MS standard like XML, create an "Open XML" (open version of XAML), convince enough people to use the *OPEN* XAML instead of the MS one (via marketing/strategy etc), and then MS "lose" their control over the standard because the market forces the standard to be and remain open.
I don't know why a web browser would care about specific filesystems.
Well I suppose YMMV as they say, but sheesh, in my experience, no way in hell is IE faster than Mozilla/Firefox. For at least several years and IE versions now I can say for sure that IE is noticably much slower than Firefox (to load, and to autocomplete URLs, and to open new windows, and to open new tabs, and to load pages, and to render and display the pages). IE also has annoying problems that make you make much longer to view the page like waiting for an entire table to download before showing any of the table.
It's true though that Moz/Firefox seem to use more RAM than IE to display the same page. That usually doesn't bother me except when viewing large documents like the PHP manual.
It's true, piracy is not theft, and even the law recognizes the distinction even if RIAA propaganda tends to blur the distinctions.
One could pose the question though: if you did figure out a way to clone Ferrarris easily at virtually no cost, by simply cloning Ferrarris you could flood the market with cheap, perfect clones of Ferrarris. People would choose the cloned one because who would pay so much when they could get a Ferrarri for virtually nothing? By increasing supply of a usually naturally scarce resource, you can reduce the cost to the point where Ferrarri cannot compete and will have to close down. (Of course, this sounds bad and unfair, but isn't really necessarily so: if you did create such an invention, one could then also question whether or not Ferrarri deserved to continue to exist anyway, because a company has no inherent right to continue to exist if competition can produce the same product for far cheaper - at least in principle. Choosing the more efficient (cheaper) company is not in any way necessarily "stealing from" the less efficient (more expensive) company (despite what the Rambus guys say;).. kidding)).
Software has no natural scarcity once in production, but does cost money to design and improve. Anti-piracy measures (legal or technological) are there to create artificial scarcity to protect the income of the software manufacturer. However the value that software manufacturers provide to the consumer is not the manufacturing (non-scarce) part of the product, but the design part of the product. Thus in a truly competitive and efficient economy, software manufacturers would only be "entitled" to generate profits from the design part of their costs. Companies like Microsoft have no inherent "right" to generate insane amounts of profit (how many other huge companies have the explicit goal (and luxury) of having enough cash in the bank to keep the company afloat for five years with no income?). So they're effectively skimming excess wealth from companies that could otherwise have been used to improve efficiency with the companies that use MS products, negating many of the advantages of using the products in the first place. Their income is disproportionate to the value their products add, and upgrade lock-ins and annual licensing schemes serve to attempt to generate continual revenue for the once-off design of software (scarce) by pretending to let people pay continually for delivery/distribution of software (non-scarce). In other words, money for nothing.
You're right, Telkom is putting something of 'handbrake' on the South African economy with their monopoly pricing, terrible and slow service roll-out, and artificially created bandwidth scarcity (they have a lot of international bandwidth on an undersea fiber cable that is literally unused because they heavily limit ISPs access to the bandwidth in order to drive up prices). But:
If someone in the Department of Communication reads this: Stop over regulating communications.
Writing on/. is not going to help. I can almost certainly assure you that Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri is not reading slashdot. If you want change, rather write well-written formal pleas to the cabinet, in writing, and CC'd to the press. If enough SAn individuals and businesses who cared got together and lobbied the government and placed pressure on government to speed up telecomms regulation reform, we'll at least have a better chance.
Note that a new provider has recently appeared providing always-on Internet access at notably cheaper rates than Telkom using wireless 3G technology: the Sentech MyWireless product. I'm using it to write this, it works pretty well. But it's not at the level that it should be. And certainly, the legal restrictions on carrying of voice data must be done away with.
As someone pointed out, the problems are not that we don't know 'who needs aid where' or where problems are flaring up. We have that information. The problem is not technological, it's sociological - people just do not give a f*(k. The developed world doesn't care, and it's time to stop this annoying pretense that we really care, because we don't. The world was full well aware of what was happening in Rwanda 10 years ago, and did nothing anyway. And this was not an isolated incident, it's endemic, and occurs even when the problems are caused by developed countries (e.g. Portugal pulling all infrastructure out of Mozambique, or cold war countries (US and Soviet Union) funding civil wars in the region). We know what's happening in places like Zimbabwe but we more or less look the other way. This applies everywhere in fact, for example we know about human rights violations in China but we look the other way as long as it benefits us economically. We looked the other way most of apartheid, especially when SA was effectively "helping the US" in fighting Soviet invasions in the region.
You don't need wireless networking + FOSS programs to know where trouble spots are, you just need to open news.google.com. If you really cared, you would be doing this already. I'm not trying to flame you, but let's face it, this just is the way things are. If you really cared, you'd have done more than five minutes reading about problems in Rwanda, you'd be spending some time studying the problems and figuring out solutions. It's not a case of "hey let's just chuck some technology in there and it'll solve these problems that we don't actually know anything about". I'm also not saying that you should feel obligated (out of some stupid sense of guilt) to even want to help. I'm just asking for some honesty. If you want to help, help, if you don't want to, just admit it. Because the common empty "promises" of aid from the developed world do more harm than good, just serving to keep poor people dependently waiting for the aid rather than taking their future into their own hands. Ultimately Africa is slowly improving, and slowly beginning to grow, and to work together to solve it's own problems... and quite frankly, it's no thanks to the developed world. The change is driven from within. So if you want to help, sure, come over and help, you'll be welcomed with open arms. But don't sit in an armchair in a comfortable secure home surrounded by material luxuries while feigning deep concern about the problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, right on - the accuracy, utility and soundness of God's word is why we now have television, cellphones, wireless networks, computers, the Internet, the telephone system, automobiles, passenger aircraft, video-conferencing, remotely piloted vehicles on Mars, gastro-enteroscopy, pacemakers, kidney dialysis machines, spectacles, contact lenses, anti-inflammatories, the polio vaccine, etc etc. People built all those things and more thanks to the detailed explanations of how our world works that is laid out in the Bible! Definitely better to not trust scientists, whose painstaking methodologies have not created any benefits or advancements whatsoever in our understanding of the Universe over the last 2000 years.
Oh, a small hint: read up about what the scientific method is, because you clearly don't even understand it. It's always better to actually understand something before you criticize it.
And of course the First Nazi Party also used the excuse that Jews were "potential terrorists" to enrage the German populace
It's also a page right out of the old South African apartheid government's book - all freedom fighters or activists were labelled "terrorists" and portrayed as such in the state-controlled media, to maintain white voter support for the oppression of blacks. They spun and wove fear that those 'evil terrorists' (who really were freedom fighters) would take over and destroy everything if they didn't continue the violent oppression, but of course this only made the cycle of violence inevitably spiral higher and higher (until SA got really lucky with De Klerk and Mandela).
Um, where's the hype in question? You just summarised the Wired article, which also states quite clearly, just as you did, that they've only demonstrated this in a computer simulation and a petri dish. I did not get any new information or even 'slant' from your post over and above the Wired article.
Grow up man .. for god's sake, just go and look up the meaning of the word "troll". It's not a troll just because it might be wrong. Seems people here have developed some sort of knee-jerk "troll" reaction to anything they're even vaguely in disagreement with.
And what, you think they're doing breathalizer tests to make sure that every person who signs up is sober at the time they do? Puh-lease. It's a club, half of these people are already drunk. Sure, it's not quite "waking up with an RFID tag in your arm", but it's definitely not going to be sober, rational decision-making all round as you imply.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic here (don't know the Outlook side), but Office 2003 was mostly just a facelist for Office XP. Do you know how many people really think that the new version is very different just because they made it look different? It's idiotic. Conversely, they could have added tonnes of new features, and if they had left the look and feel the same, same idiots would then think that nothing had changed. Software developers virtually have to change the look and feel of new versions of their software, just to fool users into thinking they're getting some "major" new thing. Just plain psychology.
Odd, I thought that the idea of "Office 2004" sounded ridiculous simply because MS only just released Office 2003 last year, which is anyway scarcely more than a patch for Office XP. They have almost never released new versions of any major product less than 2 or 3 years apart, the chances seem pretty slim of a "Word 2004" this early in 2004 already, even a beta.
In any case, anyone with any sense would have checked Microsoft's own site first to see if this thing even existed. Especially since it sounds suspicious to begin with. But then maybe Mac users really are just so shielded from the world of trojans/viruses etc that they are just naive. Like an immune system that's been protected from exposure to bacteria for ten or twenty years, or a species that has been living in a threat-free paradise for too long. Sounds very much like Darwinism.
Please, detail these closed-source disasters for us.
Hmm .... well, I can't seem to get Puyo Puyo to run on Windows XP!
Seriously though, with relation to BitKeeper, if you RTA he mentions that there is a "BK2CVS gateway", which will automatically export your BK repository (with history) to a CVS database nightly. So if BK disappears, NO PROBLEM. That also ensures that they (BK) have no meaningful incentive to pull a bait-n-switch and hold your data to ransom.
Where do you draw the line? It's a slippery slope. One of the most commonly used protocols by far for illegal copying is Microsoft Windows file-sharing (otherwise known as SMB). So by your reasoning, if we can hold the author of a p2p system liable, then we ABSOLUTELY MUST also hold Microsoft liable when it happens on their systems. Or do you have some magic, objective point at which you can draw the line and say "this file-sharing tool good, that one bad"? Sorry, but you have to either deem file-sharing tools ALL ILLEGAL, or ALL LEGAL. And yeah yeah I know that SMB is used in legal ways too, but so are all file-sharing tools.
Apart from patent issues, there are better and more obvious reasons to use PNGs: the filesize is smaller for all but the smallest GIFs.
Was nobody paying attention when Rumsfeld, Gen. Myers and the other Pentagon brass were testifying?
Indeed, the comments here are disturbing, especially if one contemplates that people who comment here that they "thought they read that dose pichas were actually from some porn shoot in LA or sumthing" (at least a day AFTER Rumsfeld publicly stated that the pictures were real and only the tip of the iceberg) are also people who have the power to vote in November. It's as if freedom of the press probably doesn't even matter to a large portion of the population, because they aren't paying attention anyway. Surely one should be expected to have even a tiny clue about what is happening in the real world before making such important decisions .. *sigh*.
However, we have to keep in mind that the scope of the problem is very limited to a few people who took part in this whole prison thing.
But the rest of the world has no way of knowing the true scope of this, because the US refuses to let anyone monitor what is going in any of the other prisons (e.g. in Cuba, Afghanistan and others in Iraq). And quite frankly the fact that the US refuses to let anyone monitor what is happening makes it seem extremely likely that this sort of stuff is endemic. If not, then what is the US trying to hid in all those other prisons? Why not let monitors in if they're not committing war crimes in there?
Up until the release of these pics, most of the rest of the world could still give the US the benefit of the doubt, and say well maybe they're not doing anything bad. But with the release of these pics, that is gone, and there is absolutely no reason to take the US's word anymore that they're not committing war crimes everywhere. There is no credibility left, the chances seem pretty slim that this was an isolated incident.
Actually there are at least two murder investigations under way. At least three prisoners died, and the medical examiners ruled two of the three deaths to be homicides.
Well, you're right about one thing: that was a dumb question. Do some reading, learn a little about what it's really about, learn a little about the implications of this.
I guess you aren't paying much attention then. Rumsfeld has been all over the news stating that the photos are not only real, but that there are far worse very brutal pictures that have not been publicly released. There are also at least two prisoners who were murdered, with two homicide investigations under way.
a start menu, taskbar, the same print dialogs, a "Control Center," Minimize/Maximize/Close buttons
None of those are Microsoft wheels you know. Let's stick to facts and not rewrite history here. Apple copied those wheels from Xerox Parc long before they were a twinkling in Bill Gates eyes, while other-mentioned (e.g. "start menu") already existed on some Unix systems.
However I have to agree with you. Linux developers spend way too much time copying stupid things from Windows, rather than just building something better by just thinking about it.
Well since this whole thing reads like a damn ad, perhaps HP sponsored it. or maybe they should ... corporations sponsor expenses of space travel in exchange for good exposure?
One would think so, yes, but it's not always true. For example SMB (MS standard) often beats Microsoft's own implementations in benchmarks.
MS standard like XML, create an "Open XML"
Holy crap, before I get torn to pieces, that was a (huge) mistake, I meant to type "XAML" here not "XML" (twice!)
Microsoft have spent the last thirty odd years re-inventing thousands of wheels that weren't theirs. Everything they have ever made has been a re-invention of someone else's wheel. It doesn't matter. Most people will use XAML just because it's Microsoft's, and it quite frankly has no relevance that others have done the same thing before, regardless of which one is technologically better too. Thus some or other XAML compatible extension to Firefox that allowed people to use it for XAML applications might be useful for Mozilla? And if enough people used Firefox for XAML, MS would have less power to pull 'embrace and extend' (hmm .. on their own spec? sounds a bit odd but the idea is that if enough customers used open implementations of MS standards, MS would have less power to modify the standards to enhance lock-in - breaking the standards in later versions might actually push corps away from MS and towards Firefox for those who are using, um, "Open XAML"). Basically the idea is to pull the inverse of MS's usual "embrace and extend" strategy. Instead of MS taking an open standard and introducing proprietary extensions, you take an MS standard like XML, create an "Open XML" (open version of XAML), convince enough people to use the *OPEN* XAML instead of the MS one (via marketing/strategy etc), and then MS "lose" their control over the standard because the market forces the standard to be and remain open.
I don't know why a web browser would care about specific filesystems.
Well I suppose YMMV as they say, but sheesh, in my experience, no way in hell is IE faster than Mozilla/Firefox. For at least several years and IE versions now I can say for sure that IE is noticably much slower than Firefox (to load, and to autocomplete URLs, and to open new windows, and to open new tabs, and to load pages, and to render and display the pages). IE also has annoying problems that make you make much longer to view the page like waiting for an entire table to download before showing any of the table.
It's true though that Moz/Firefox seem to use more RAM than IE to display the same page. That usually doesn't bother me except when viewing large documents like the PHP manual.
It's true, piracy is not theft, and even the law recognizes the distinction even if RIAA propaganda tends to blur the distinctions.
One could pose the question though: if you did figure out a way to clone Ferrarris easily at virtually no cost, by simply cloning Ferrarris you could flood the market with cheap, perfect clones of Ferrarris. People would choose the cloned one because who would pay so much when they could get a Ferrarri for virtually nothing? By increasing supply of a usually naturally scarce resource, you can reduce the cost to the point where Ferrarri cannot compete and will have to close down. (Of course, this sounds bad and unfair, but isn't really necessarily so: if you did create such an invention, one could then also question whether or not Ferrarri deserved to continue to exist anyway, because a company has no inherent right to continue to exist if competition can produce the same product for far cheaper - at least in principle. Choosing the more efficient (cheaper) company is not in any way necessarily "stealing from" the less efficient (more expensive) company (despite what the Rambus guys say ;) .. kidding)).
Software has no natural scarcity once in production, but does cost money to design and improve. Anti-piracy measures (legal or technological) are there to create artificial scarcity to protect the income of the software manufacturer. However the value that software manufacturers provide to the consumer is not the manufacturing (non-scarce) part of the product, but the design part of the product. Thus in a truly competitive and efficient economy, software manufacturers would only be "entitled" to generate profits from the design part of their costs. Companies like Microsoft have no inherent "right" to generate insane amounts of profit (how many other huge companies have the explicit goal (and luxury) of having enough cash in the bank to keep the company afloat for five years with no income?). So they're effectively skimming excess wealth from companies that could otherwise have been used to improve efficiency with the companies that use MS products, negating many of the advantages of using the products in the first place. Their income is disproportionate to the value their products add, and upgrade lock-ins and annual licensing schemes serve to attempt to generate continual revenue for the once-off design of software (scarce) by pretending to let people pay continually for delivery/distribution of software (non-scarce). In other words, money for nothing.
You're right, Telkom is putting something of 'handbrake' on the South African economy with their monopoly pricing, terrible and slow service roll-out, and artificially created bandwidth scarcity (they have a lot of international bandwidth on an undersea fiber cable that is literally unused because they heavily limit ISPs access to the bandwidth in order to drive up prices). But:
If someone in the Department of Communication reads this: Stop over regulating communications.
Writing on /. is not going to help. I can almost certainly assure you that Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri is not reading slashdot. If you want change, rather write well-written formal pleas to the cabinet, in writing, and CC'd to the press. If enough SAn individuals and businesses who cared got together and lobbied the government and placed pressure on government to speed up telecomms regulation reform, we'll at least have a better chance.
Note that a new provider has recently appeared providing always-on Internet access at notably cheaper rates than Telkom using wireless 3G technology: the Sentech MyWireless product. I'm using it to write this, it works pretty well. But it's not at the level that it should be. And certainly, the legal restrictions on carrying of voice data must be done away with.
Some rather overly negative (sensation to grab readers?) article headlines there. The articles themselves are a bit more rational though.
As someone pointed out, the problems are not that we don't know 'who needs aid where' or where problems are flaring up. We have that information. The problem is not technological, it's sociological - people just do not give a f*(k. The developed world doesn't care, and it's time to stop this annoying pretense that we really care, because we don't. The world was full well aware of what was happening in Rwanda 10 years ago, and did nothing anyway. And this was not an isolated incident, it's endemic, and occurs even when the problems are caused by developed countries (e.g. Portugal pulling all infrastructure out of Mozambique, or cold war countries (US and Soviet Union) funding civil wars in the region). We know what's happening in places like Zimbabwe but we more or less look the other way. This applies everywhere in fact, for example we know about human rights violations in China but we look the other way as long as it benefits us economically. We looked the other way most of apartheid, especially when SA was effectively "helping the US" in fighting Soviet invasions in the region.
You don't need wireless networking + FOSS programs to know where trouble spots are, you just need to open news.google.com. If you really cared, you would be doing this already. I'm not trying to flame you, but let's face it, this just is the way things are. If you really cared, you'd have done more than five minutes reading about problems in Rwanda, you'd be spending some time studying the problems and figuring out solutions. It's not a case of "hey let's just chuck some technology in there and it'll solve these problems that we don't actually know anything about". I'm also not saying that you should feel obligated (out of some stupid sense of guilt) to even want to help. I'm just asking for some honesty. If you want to help, help, if you don't want to, just admit it. Because the common empty "promises" of aid from the developed world do more harm than good, just serving to keep poor people dependently waiting for the aid rather than taking their future into their own hands. Ultimately Africa is slowly improving, and slowly beginning to grow, and to work together to solve it's own problems ... and quite frankly, it's no thanks to the developed world. The change is driven from within. So if you want to help, sure, come over and help, you'll be welcomed with open arms. But don't sit in an armchair in a comfortable secure home surrounded by material luxuries while feigning deep concern about the problems.