Of course the next step in DRM will be special booths that you have to be strip searched to enter, then and only then will you be allowed to listen to content on DRM protected devices. You will be searched again while leaving the booths.:) Then and only then will DRM work, and damnit someone will find a way around it.
Back in the days of Shakespeare, when copyright didn't really exist, there were people with trained memories who would go to the first night of one of his plays, make notes, and then later recreate the entire play largely from memory. A rival theatre would then put on a production of Shakespeare's new (and extremely popular) play.
Music, being more patterned and generally shorter, should be even easier to recreate from memory.
True, but the main reason people have accidents on straight stretches of road is because they're not braking hard enough, regardless of ABS or not.
I believe that some car manufacturers have been experimenting with systems where if you suddenly slam on the brakes, the computer takes over and will apply maximum braking force until the car comes to a halt, to deal with this very problem. These are on vehicles with smart ABS, of course, so you don't risk locking the wheels. This strikes me as being quite a good idea.
(And yeah, before I get fifty people moaning about the accidents caused by this system suddenly stopping your car in the middle of the freeway because you happened to tap the brake pedal a bit too hard, you need to press it very hard and very abruptly. i.e., you need to be intending to perform an emergency stop before the system kicks in.)
Additionally, on some cars, if you take your foot abruptly off the accelerator, the brake lights come on for half a second or so. This gives the driver behind you about quarter to half a second more warning if you're doing an emergency stop. Sounds minimal, but apparently this can be a major bonus in emergency situations.
Believe me, in an emergency situation with no was out, I'd rather be pushing the brake pedal as hard as I possibly can, if necessary locking all 4 wheels than arsing around with cadence braking.
Um, if you lock the wheels, you'll slide and it'll take you longer to stop than if you used cadence braking --- surely this is counterproductive?
I have to say that I didn't like Mario 64 very much --- that kind of collect-all-the-tokens, do-every-level-500-times adventure bores me stiff. But I agree with you completely about cameras; most of them suck.
(I was once playing Banjo and Kazooie (another game I tired of very quickly) and died because I fell down one side of a wall and the camera fell down the other side and couldn't get back to me. I could hear that I was being eaten by something, but couldn't tell what.)
The best camera work I've ever seen was in, surprise surprise, Ocarina of Time. It just felt natural most of the time, even doing things like panning up when you approached an edge so that you could see over. Interestingly, the camera in Wind Waker wasn't as good, for reasons I can't quite put my finger on; I found it annoying me in ways that it didn't in Ocarina.
You can compare spectrograms (or whatever) all you like, but they won't tell you much about how a listener will percieve the sound.
I'm sorry, but this is bullshit.
If you can show that a particular bit of hardware is producing the same audio signals as another bit of hardware, then you know that they will sound the same. By definition. By comparing the signal emitted by the iPod to the signal that you know the iPod ought to be producing, you can measure the errors in an objective fashion.
The subjective audio tests that you're talking about are only useful for trying to find out how those errors are perceived, which is irrelevant in this case. What we're interested in is what the errors actually are. If we know that the iPod hardware produces a signal with a flat response curve with no phase errors, etc, etc, then we know that the iPod is reproducing the audio accurately --- any further problems with the audio will be a product of the encoding/decoding process or audio reproduction hardware, i.e. the headphones. Neither of these are under test here.
Dear god, do they really intend that to be a meaningful description of sound quality?
What they should be doing is a proper analysis of the iPod's output. In other words, take a sample track; encode it; decode it again, to provide your baseline data; play it through the iPod, capturing the result with a high-quality, known-good A/D converter; and then comparing the result the the baseline data. This will give you an actual response curve that lets you talk about the audio quality in genuine, objective, numerical terms. If it's any good, it should be flat.
(Actually, has anyone done this? I'd be interested to see the result.)
Using crap like 'shiny' just makes you sound like one of those lunatic audiophiles who buys solid silver power cables and draws green lines around their CDs. You don't want to go there.
Reiser4: Surprisingly, I didn't see Reiser4 really shine at a whole lot in the benchmarks. The massive mount time tells me it needs to be a local drive that only needs mounting the once. Just not sure what sort of data would be best on it.
I think the ReiserFS mount times in the benchmark are misleading. From my experience, mkreiserfs creates an extremely basic file system; the first time you mount it, the file system driver itself will do a lot of heavy housekeeping, which takes ages. Subsequent mounts are much faster.
In fact, I find the whole benchmark a bit dubious. A lot of the operations will vary wildly in speed depending on how much data is currently in the buffer cache or not. This means that performing the benchmarks in a different order is going to vastly change the results... couldn't he at least put a 'sync' in every now and again?
Why do that, when they won't even use their server software to rewrite requests for ebay.com graphics from unexpected referrers to ones that have "THIS IS A SCAM" overlaying them?
Who's the referrer when it's your email package that's requesting the image?
(And yes, I know you should allow your email package to display HTML with remote images, but people do and this is the main technique phishers use to make their messages look legitimate.)
All an image -- however high the resolution -- is going to do is confirm that yes, it did crash or yes, it landed properly but failed to communicate.
That's actually a surprisingly large amount of information. Assuming this image is actually the probe, it allows us to rule out all the various catastrophic failure modes, which in turn tells us that the landing system actually worked. Had the probe failed to make it through reentry, or had the parachute or airbags not deployed, then we wouldn't be seeing this --- the probe would be scattered in lots of little pieces across the Martian surface.
In turn this allows us to validate this entire means of landing. Actually reaching the ground in one piece is possibly the hardest aspect of any extraterrestrial robotic mission, and if a low-budget approach like Beagle's actually works, then that's great news. In this case, we can tell that even though a few things went wrong and we lost the vehicle, this entire approach to getting down does, basically, work.
There's a hell of a lot to learn, but don't be intimidated, because most of it's simple, and most of it you can learn piece-by-piece.
The major thing to learn isn't even the technology --- the technology's easy, it's just a tool that you can pick up on when you need it. The really important thing you need to learn is the set of underlying principles that will let you design good pages. There's all the usual graphic design and HCI stuff that allow you to present information to the user clearly, but above all that there's the fundamental engineering directive:
If there's more than one way to do something, pick the simpler.
Don't go for the flashy toys. Go for the reliable tools. For example: don't use Flash if you can use DHTML instead. Don't use DHTML if a simple Javascript app will do the same job. Don't use Javascript if you can manage with CSS. And don't use CSS if you can redesign your page to do without that particular effect.
Note that I'm not saying that all web pages should be in plain text and look like crap; I'm saying that main thing to keep in mind is that if the purpose of the page is to convey information rather than to look pretty (and their are pages whose purpose is to look pretty), then keeping things simple will make everyone's life easier. Yours, because it's easier to do, easier to maintain, far more robust, lighter on bandwidth, etc, and also easier for the user because there's less crap to wade through. Keep your goals in mind, and pick the technology for its ability to achieve that goal, and not because it sounds neat or is the buzzword-du-jour.
Classic examples:
For file downloads, a direct link to the file rather than a link to a If-Your-File-Does-Not-Start-Downloading-In-Five-Se conds page is so much easier to manage.
If you want the user to click on a link to display an image, then create a link pointing at the image. Don't have a link that executes some Javascript to pop up a menuless frame containing a web page containing the image --- it never works properly.
If you find yourself putting text into little images in order to keep your layout happy, your layout is too fussy. Throw it away and go for something simpler. It'll work better and be less effort.
Learn to love simplicity. You will be rewarded for it.
Albeit seemingly unthinkable, Wall Street analyst Michael Pachter isn't optimistic.
I don't get this. Why is Michael Pachter unthinkable? I can think about him fine. And why is the fact that he's unthinkable at all related to the fact he's not optimistic?
Understand now? current thrusters are more volatile and are a crap shoot every time they fire them, espically on deep space probes that have not fired the engines in 15 years.
Actually, hydrazine chemical rockets these days are pretty much a solved problem. Cassini's main engine is not substantially different from the Apollo lander's main engine; IIRC, they're hypergolic hydrazine thrusters using helium to pressurise the tanks (and blow the hydrazine out). They're reliable and can cope with long periods of inactivity.
Of course, they're still chemical rockets, which inherently suck. But they're not nearly as shoddy as you make out.
Never mind that the US does have enemies and those enemies are actively trying to subvert our government, financial markets, and military.
The problem with this argument is that doing that kind of thing is, fundamentally, dumb.
These days the world is bound together by economics so tightly that no great power would dare to interfere with another great power's economy, because doing so will damage your own economy. The Chinese government may not be cute and cuddly by American standards, but they're also not stupid. The US spends such vast amounts of money in China that they are very unlikely to do anything that might cause them to stop.
The only problem is that occasionally you get a political leader who is dumb. This is rare in the big countries, because for the big countries to be big, they must have governments that work, and if they work they tend to prevent dumb people from reaching positions of power.
I think it's far more likely that these attacks, if there are organised attacks --- those news 'reports' don't actually contain any accountable information from what I can see; the SANS institute seems to be a company selling tickets to conferences --- are coming from the Chinese equivalent of l33t dud45 who are fishing for information to sell to organised crime.
...we hear the "Bush lied, people died" mantra of the lefties who seem to prefer suppressive murderous governments...
I think you've fallen for the Big Lie: that evil exists. It doesn't. There is no such thing. There are only people.
It's very, very easy to tag people as being Evil (or with some other name, like 'lefties') because it means that you don't have to understand them any more. Q: Why did this person hijack a plane and fly it into a building? A: Because he's Evil. It's too easy.
The truth is that that person is a person, just as valid is you or I. He had opinions, beliefs, a childhood. He had a mother and a father. When he was 5 the family cat died and he cried for three days. When he was 10 he had a crush on the girl two houses down that he was too embarassed to admit. When he was 13 he had his first wet dream and sneaked out the back with the dirty sheets, terrified his parents would find out. When he was 16, he got into a fight with a friend and broke his arm by accident, and he had nightmares about it for years.
He was real.
But people don't like to think about this. It's easier to kill people if you don't believe they're people. If you can just tag them as The Enemy you don't have to deal with them any more. He probably believed he was doing the right thing, that he was one of the good guys striking a blow against evil. He probably deeply regretted the fact that so many innocent people were going to die, but believed that it was necessary, and that he had no choice. He may have prayed for them, asking God to forgive them their sins and accept them into heaven, despite their heathen ways. You might have liked him.
It's far too easy to bandy around words like 'oppressive murderous governments', except you're forgetting that countries are not governments, they're made of people, and those people are going to be hurt. How many innocent Iraqi civilians do you think have been hurt or killed in the US invasion? How many people in the Iraqi government have been hurt or killed? The first number is a hell of a lot bigger than the second number.
How many innocent Iraqi civilians do you think would have been hurt if the invasion had not happened?
If you are that paranoid, use a bogus e-mail, and bogus home address/phone number.
You might be interested in DodgeIt. It's a site that provides unsecured, public, read-only email inboxes. To use it, simply send an email to somerandomphrase@dodgeit.com... and then go the the website, enter 'somerandomphrase' into the box, and see your message. No setup required.
The mail's kept for a short period of time, it's mostly anonymous (DodgeIt could theoretically record the IP address of incoming connections and track you that way), it's totally public, and no setup whatsoever is required. Very cool.
You're assuming these laptops can be magically connected to the Internet.
No, I'm not --- I explicitly mentioned store-and-forward and mesh networking. A village (which may only have one of these) stores its outgoing messages on a single device. Somebody goes to the market to do the normal trading, in a nearby town. The device will send-and-receive as it passes near any other devices. Done.
(This also allows a very cost-effective way of improving the service: send a guy on a motorbike with one of these things on rounds of the various villages. He arrives in one village; picks up and drops messages; moves on to the next village...)
You're thinking far too big. These are not Pentium class laptops with gigabytes of RAM and broadband.
let's start with what they *do* need: (1) Food (2) Healthcare (3) Shelter [...] (4) a non-corrupt gov't
Please, read what I said. After achieving subsistence, I said, and food, very basic healthcare and shelter all count as subsistence.
As for (4)... do you know what the best way of countering corruption is? An educated populace.
That makes no sense. Is information from the web going to cure my cousins stage 4 non-small cell lung cancer ?
Probably nothing will.
But information from the web will teach about hygiene and disease prevention and first aid, and will allow distance learning that will train nurses and doctors, and will allow those nurses and doctors to do a lot of work at a distance, which will allow them to do more work and at the same time train more medical workers, and instead of saving one life you end up helping to bootstrap improved health for the entire country.
Also, and I don't mean to be a sourpuss, but wouldn't it be more useful to provide certain other things to third world countries, such as medical care ?
Because if you pay for medical care you get medical care. But if you pay for information, you get everything.
People in third-world countries aren't idiots, you know. In fact, there's a good chance that they're smarter than you are; they're certainly going to be better at exploiting opportunities, because they have to in order to survive. And if you ask them what they want, then you'll find that the vast majority of the time is that once they've reached basic subsistence, then what they really want is education and communication. They don't want people to do things for them. They want to learn how to do things for themselves.
I don't entire agree that laptops are the best way of doing it, but setting up a basic IT infrastructure is an entirely logical step in the right direction. Take a look at the way mass access to the 'net has changed the western world. Now imagine what that could do for a people who were actually focused on achievement and getting things done, rather than the mental masturbation that we're so keen on.
Would these $100 laptops help? Well, perhaps. A standardised platform with automatic mesh networking that can do store-and-forward email and low-power applications could be extremely useful, but first you'd have to build enough of them to get the infrastructure in place and enough of them in use to build momentum and acceptance. They're the kind of thing that would only be useful if everyone had one --- this is what killed the Cybiko, for example.
(Incidentally, I would buy one --- a simple, portable, useful computer that I don't have to worry too much about breaking would be fantastically useful for me. Particularly if it was an open platform!)
Are there any actual locals here who want to comment?
50 Cent: Bulletproof - Game is loosely based on the gangster lifestyle of rapper Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson. Player engages in gangster shootouts and loots the bodies of victims to buy new 50 Cent recordings and music videos.
Dear god. Whichever marketing executive thought this sounded like a good idea for a game really, really needs to cut down on the medication.
Odd. I couldn't get the page to do this even when disabling adblock and flashblock. Could you be a bit more specific when you say it "spams you anyway"? Unless you're using the word "spam" in ways that aren't normal, I find this highly dubious.
I went to the page, it loaded, it popped up a dialogue asked me something about a survey, I hit CANCEL because I had no other choice, and it took me away from the page that had just loaded and landed me on the survey. This is, from my point of view, unacceptable behaviour.
There may have been cookies as well; I habitually deny everything unless there's a good reason for needing them.
As for NoScript, which has been recommended elsewhere --- I actually *want* Javascript on most of the time, because it tends to be needed to make exotic page navigation work properly. But I'd also like to have a easy, one-hit 'you lose' button for when sites abuse it. Does NoScript do this sort of thing? Does the button still work when a dialogue is popped up?
...pops up a dialogue asking whether you want to be spammed and then spams you anyway when you hit CANCEL.
Does anyone think that a very handy Firefox add-on would be a button attached to this kind of dialogue that would instantly kill all Javascript scripts stone dead for the page? Once an OK/Cancel dialogue is up, you can't interact with Firefox's UI until you've responded to the dialogue and let the Javascript do something, which I think is poor design.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the days of Shakespeare, when copyright didn't really exist, there were people with trained memories who would go to the first night of one of his plays, make notes, and then later recreate the entire play largely from memory. A rival theatre would then put on a production of Shakespeare's new (and extremely popular) play.
Music, being more patterned and generally shorter, should be even easier to recreate from memory.
Have you ever had occasion to use it? Does it work?
I believe that some car manufacturers have been experimenting with systems where if you suddenly slam on the brakes, the computer takes over and will apply maximum braking force until the car comes to a halt, to deal with this very problem. These are on vehicles with smart ABS, of course, so you don't risk locking the wheels. This strikes me as being quite a good idea.
(And yeah, before I get fifty people moaning about the accidents caused by this system suddenly stopping your car in the middle of the freeway because you happened to tap the brake pedal a bit too hard, you need to press it very hard and very abruptly. i.e., you need to be intending to perform an emergency stop before the system kicks in.)
Additionally, on some cars, if you take your foot abruptly off the accelerator, the brake lights come on for half a second or so. This gives the driver behind you about quarter to half a second more warning if you're doing an emergency stop. Sounds minimal, but apparently this can be a major bonus in emergency situations. Believe me, in an emergency situation with no was out, I'd rather be pushing the brake pedal as hard as I possibly can, if necessary locking all 4 wheels than arsing around with cadence braking.
Um, if you lock the wheels, you'll slide and it'll take you longer to stop than if you used cadence braking --- surely this is counterproductive?
(I was once playing Banjo and Kazooie (another game I tired of very quickly) and died because I fell down one side of a wall and the camera fell down the other side and couldn't get back to me. I could hear that I was being eaten by something, but couldn't tell what.)
The best camera work I've ever seen was in, surprise surprise, Ocarina of Time. It just felt natural most of the time, even doing things like panning up when you approached an edge so that you could see over. Interestingly, the camera in Wind Waker wasn't as good, for reasons I can't quite put my finger on; I found it annoying me in ways that it didn't in Ocarina.
You can compare spectrograms (or whatever) all you like, but they won't tell you much about how a listener will percieve the sound.
I'm sorry, but this is bullshit.
If you can show that a particular bit of hardware is producing the same audio signals as another bit of hardware, then you know that they will sound the same. By definition. By comparing the signal emitted by the iPod to the signal that you know the iPod ought to be producing, you can measure the errors in an objective fashion.
The subjective audio tests that you're talking about are only useful for trying to find out how those errors are perceived, which is irrelevant in this case. What we're interested in is what the errors actually are. If we know that the iPod hardware produces a signal with a flat response curve with no phase errors, etc, etc, then we know that the iPod is reproducing the audio accurately --- any further problems with the audio will be a product of the encoding/decoding process or audio reproduction hardware, i.e. the headphones. Neither of these are under test here.
What they should be doing is a proper analysis of the iPod's output. In other words, take a sample track; encode it; decode it again, to provide your baseline data; play it through the iPod, capturing the result with a high-quality, known-good A/D converter; and then comparing the result the the baseline data. This will give you an actual response curve that lets you talk about the audio quality in genuine, objective, numerical terms. If it's any good, it should be flat.
(Actually, has anyone done this? I'd be interested to see the result.)
Using crap like 'shiny' just makes you sound like one of those lunatic audiophiles who buys solid silver power cables and draws green lines around their CDs. You don't want to go there.
D'oh!
But what's the sleep in aid of? It'll achieve precisely nothing --- the sync will block until all I/O is complete.
I think the ReiserFS mount times in the benchmark are misleading. From my experience, mkreiserfs creates an extremely basic file system; the first time you mount it, the file system driver itself will do a lot of heavy housekeeping, which takes ages. Subsequent mounts are much faster.
In fact, I find the whole benchmark a bit dubious. A lot of the operations will vary wildly in speed depending on how much data is currently in the buffer cache or not. This means that performing the benchmarks in a different order is going to vastly change the results... couldn't he at least put a 'sync' in every now and again?
Nitch?
Who's the referrer when it's your email package that's requesting the image?
(And yes, I know you should allow your email package to display HTML with remote images, but people do and this is the main technique phishers use to make their messages look legitimate.)
That's actually a surprisingly large amount of information. Assuming this image is actually the probe, it allows us to rule out all the various catastrophic failure modes, which in turn tells us that the landing system actually worked. Had the probe failed to make it through reentry, or had the parachute or airbags not deployed, then we wouldn't be seeing this --- the probe would be scattered in lots of little pieces across the Martian surface.
In turn this allows us to validate this entire means of landing. Actually reaching the ground in one piece is possibly the hardest aspect of any extraterrestrial robotic mission, and if a low-budget approach like Beagle's actually works, then that's great news. In this case, we can tell that even though a few things went wrong and we lost the vehicle, this entire approach to getting down does, basically, work.
The major thing to learn isn't even the technology --- the technology's easy, it's just a tool that you can pick up on when you need it. The really important thing you need to learn is the set of underlying principles that will let you design good pages. There's all the usual graphic design and HCI stuff that allow you to present information to the user clearly, but above all that there's the fundamental engineering directive:
If there's more than one way to do something, pick the simpler.
Don't go for the flashy toys. Go for the reliable tools. For example: don't use Flash if you can use DHTML instead. Don't use DHTML if a simple Javascript app will do the same job. Don't use Javascript if you can manage with CSS. And don't use CSS if you can redesign your page to do without that particular effect.
Note that I'm not saying that all web pages should be in plain text and look like crap; I'm saying that main thing to keep in mind is that if the purpose of the page is to convey information rather than to look pretty (and their are pages whose purpose is to look pretty), then keeping things simple will make everyone's life easier. Yours, because it's easier to do, easier to maintain, far more robust, lighter on bandwidth, etc, and also easier for the user because there's less crap to wade through. Keep your goals in mind, and pick the technology for its ability to achieve that goal, and not because it sounds neat or is the buzzword-du-jour.
Classic examples:
Learn to love simplicity. You will be rewarded for it.
I wonder if they've recently found a stone statuette of some kind of lizard creature?
I don't get this. Why is Michael Pachter unthinkable? I can think about him fine. And why is the fact that he's unthinkable at all related to the fact he's not optimistic?
Actually, hydrazine chemical rockets these days are pretty much a solved problem. Cassini's main engine is not substantially different from the Apollo lander's main engine; IIRC, they're hypergolic hydrazine thrusters using helium to pressurise the tanks (and blow the hydrazine out). They're reliable and can cope with long periods of inactivity.
Of course, they're still chemical rockets, which inherently suck. But they're not nearly as shoddy as you make out.
The problem with this argument is that doing that kind of thing is, fundamentally, dumb.
These days the world is bound together by economics so tightly that no great power would dare to interfere with another great power's economy, because doing so will damage your own economy. The Chinese government may not be cute and cuddly by American standards, but they're also not stupid. The US spends such vast amounts of money in China that they are very unlikely to do anything that might cause them to stop.
The only problem is that occasionally you get a political leader who is dumb. This is rare in the big countries, because for the big countries to be big, they must have governments that work, and if they work they tend to prevent dumb people from reaching positions of power.
I think it's far more likely that these attacks, if there are organised attacks --- those news 'reports' don't actually contain any accountable information from what I can see; the SANS institute seems to be a company selling tickets to conferences --- are coming from the Chinese equivalent of l33t dud45 who are fishing for information to sell to organised crime.
I think you've fallen for the Big Lie: that evil exists. It doesn't. There is no such thing. There are only people.
It's very, very easy to tag people as being Evil (or with some other name, like 'lefties') because it means that you don't have to understand them any more. Q: Why did this person hijack a plane and fly it into a building? A: Because he's Evil. It's too easy.
The truth is that that person is a person, just as valid is you or I. He had opinions, beliefs, a childhood. He had a mother and a father. When he was 5 the family cat died and he cried for three days. When he was 10 he had a crush on the girl two houses down that he was too embarassed to admit. When he was 13 he had his first wet dream and sneaked out the back with the dirty sheets, terrified his parents would find out. When he was 16, he got into a fight with a friend and broke his arm by accident, and he had nightmares about it for years.
He was real.
But people don't like to think about this. It's easier to kill people if you don't believe they're people. If you can just tag them as The Enemy you don't have to deal with them any more. He probably believed he was doing the right thing, that he was one of the good guys striking a blow against evil. He probably deeply regretted the fact that so many innocent people were going to die, but believed that it was necessary, and that he had no choice. He may have prayed for them, asking God to forgive them their sins and accept them into heaven, despite their heathen ways. You might have liked him.
It's far too easy to bandy around words like 'oppressive murderous governments', except you're forgetting that countries are not governments, they're made of people, and those people are going to be hurt. How many innocent Iraqi civilians do you think have been hurt or killed in the US invasion? How many people in the Iraqi government have been hurt or killed? The first number is a hell of a lot bigger than the second number.
How many innocent Iraqi civilians do you think would have been hurt if the invasion had not happened?
You might be interested in DodgeIt. It's a site that provides unsecured, public, read-only email inboxes. To use it, simply send an email to somerandomphrase@dodgeit.com... and then go the the website, enter 'somerandomphrase' into the box, and see your message. No setup required.
The mail's kept for a short period of time, it's mostly anonymous (DodgeIt could theoretically record the IP address of incoming connections and track you that way), it's totally public, and no setup whatsoever is required. Very cool.
No, I'm not --- I explicitly mentioned store-and-forward and mesh networking. A village (which may only have one of these) stores its outgoing messages on a single device. Somebody goes to the market to do the normal trading, in a nearby town. The device will send-and-receive as it passes near any other devices. Done.
(This also allows a very cost-effective way of improving the service: send a guy on a motorbike with one of these things on rounds of the various villages. He arrives in one village; picks up and drops messages; moves on to the next village...)
You're thinking far too big. These are not Pentium class laptops with gigabytes of RAM and broadband.
let's start with what they *do* need: (1) Food (2) Healthcare (3) Shelter [...] (4) a non-corrupt gov't
Please, read what I said. After achieving subsistence, I said, and food, very basic healthcare and shelter all count as subsistence.
As for (4)... do you know what the best way of countering corruption is? An educated populace.
Probably nothing will.
But information from the web will teach about hygiene and disease prevention and first aid, and will allow distance learning that will train nurses and doctors, and will allow those nurses and doctors to do a lot of work at a distance, which will allow them to do more work and at the same time train more medical workers, and instead of saving one life you end up helping to bootstrap improved health for the entire country.
Because if you pay for medical care you get medical care. But if you pay for information, you get everything.
People in third-world countries aren't idiots, you know. In fact, there's a good chance that they're smarter than you are; they're certainly going to be better at exploiting opportunities, because they have to in order to survive. And if you ask them what they want, then you'll find that the vast majority of the time is that once they've reached basic subsistence, then what they really want is education and communication. They don't want people to do things for them. They want to learn how to do things for themselves.
I don't entire agree that laptops are the best way of doing it, but setting up a basic IT infrastructure is an entirely logical step in the right direction. Take a look at the way mass access to the 'net has changed the western world. Now imagine what that could do for a people who were actually focused on achievement and getting things done, rather than the mental masturbation that we're so keen on.
Would these $100 laptops help? Well, perhaps. A standardised platform with automatic mesh networking that can do store-and-forward email and low-power applications could be extremely useful, but first you'd have to build enough of them to get the infrastructure in place and enough of them in use to build momentum and acceptance. They're the kind of thing that would only be useful if everyone had one --- this is what killed the Cybiko, for example.
(Incidentally, I would buy one --- a simple, portable, useful computer that I don't have to worry too much about breaking would be fantastically useful for me. Particularly if it was an open platform!)
Are there any actual locals here who want to comment?
Well, if you don't file a bug report, you can hardly complain when the bugs don't get fixed...
Did you file a bug report?
Dear god. Whichever marketing executive thought this sounded like a good idea for a game really, really needs to cut down on the medication.
I went to the page, it loaded, it popped up a dialogue asked me something about a survey, I hit CANCEL because I had no other choice, and it took me away from the page that had just loaded and landed me on the survey. This is, from my point of view, unacceptable behaviour.
There may have been cookies as well; I habitually deny everything unless there's a good reason for needing them.
As for NoScript, which has been recommended elsewhere --- I actually *want* Javascript on most of the time, because it tends to be needed to make exotic page navigation work properly. But I'd also like to have a easy, one-hit 'you lose' button for when sites abuse it. Does NoScript do this sort of thing? Does the button still work when a dialogue is popped up?
Does anyone think that a very handy Firefox add-on would be a button attached to this kind of dialogue that would instantly kill all Javascript scripts stone dead for the page? Once an OK/Cancel dialogue is up, you can't interact with Firefox's UI until you've responded to the dialogue and let the Javascript do something, which I think is poor design.