Check out Orbiter - without a doubt the most realistic (and incredible) space flight simulator around. My little brother has basically taught himself orbital mechanics using Orbiter and online tutorials for the game (if you can call it that!) The real deal - Hohmann transfer orbits and spaceflight mechanics-type concepts I'd never heard of.
When I saw "the space game", I thought for sure they were talking about Orbiter. If "designing your own route to Jupiter" is something you're interested in, do yourself a favour and check it out.
I sometimes wonder if perhaps government needs another wing,
an executive, a legislature, a judiciary and another wing(investigative?) with the job of (but not monopoly on)letting everyone know what the hell the other 3 are up to
I'm often surprised (and impressed) by how well the CBC here in Canada and the BBC in the UK objectively report on government actions and policies. Both of them are government-owned entities, but they seem to provide a much more critical lens on that very government than the private commercial news broadcasters do. It's really counter-intuitive.
Copyright and wrong Why the rules on copyright need to return to their roots
Apr 8th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
WHEN Parliament decided, in 1709, to create a law that would protect books from piracy, the London-based publishers and booksellers who had been pushing for such protection were overjoyed. When Queen Anne gave her assent on April 10th the following year—300 years ago this week—to “An act for the encouragement of learning” they were less enthused. Parliament had given them rights, but it had set a time limit on them: 21 years for books already in print and 14 years for new ones, with an additional 14 years if the author was still alive when the first term ran out. After that, the material would enter the public domain so that anyone could reproduce it. The lawmakers intended thus to balance the incentive to create with the interest that society has in free access to knowledge and art. The Statute of Anne thus helped nurture and channel the spate of inventiveness that Enlightenment society and its successors have since enjoyed.
Over the past 50 years, however, that balance has shifted. Largely thanks to the entertainment industry’s lawyers and lobbyists, copyright’s scope and duration have vastly increased. In America, copyright holders get 95 years’ protection as a result of an extension granted in 1998, derided by critics as the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act”. They are now calling for even greater protection, and there have been efforts to introduce similar terms in Europe. Such arguments should be resisted: it is time to tip the balance back.
Annie get your gun
Lengthy protection, it is argued, increases the incentive to create. Digital technology seems to strengthen the argument: by making copying easier, it seems to demand greater protection in return. The idea of extending copyright also has a moral appeal. Intellectual property can seem very like real property, especially when it is yours, and not some faceless corporation’s. As a result people feel that once they own it—especially if they have made it—they should go on owning it, much as they would a house that they could pass on to their descendants. On this reading, protection should be perpetual. Ratcheting up the time limit on a regular basis becomes a reasonable way of approximating that perpetuity.
The notion that lengthening copyright increases creativity is questionable, however. Authors and artists do not generally consult the statute books before deciding whether or not to pick up pen or paintbrush. And overlong copyrights often limit, rather than encourage, a work’s dissemination, impact and influence. It can be difficult to locate copyright holders to obtain the rights to reuse old material. As a result, much content ends up in legal limbo (and in the case of old movies and sound recordings, is left to deteriorate—copying them in order to preserve them may constitute an act of infringement). The penalties even for inadvertent infringement are so punishing that creators routinely have to self-censor their work. Nor does the advent of digital technology strengthen the case for extending the period of protection. Copyright protection is needed partly to cover the costs of creating and distributing works in physical form. Digital technology slashes such costs, and thus reduces the argument for protection.
The moral case, although easy to sympathise with, is a way of trying to have one’s cake and eat it. Copyright was originally the grant of a temporary government-supported monopoly on copying a work, not a property right. From 1710 onwards, it has involved a deal in which the creator or publisher gives up any natural and perp
Virgin Mobile here in Canada is (i'm guessing) the same idea; they use other carriers' towers, you buy the phone at Wal-Mart.
And seriously (not to be a shill) but their pre-paid service is vastly cheaper than any of the competition where I live (Saskatchewan). I thought the prices were pretty comparable, then I realized the other providers add service and 911 fees on top of the prices they advertise, and charge that much again for call display or voicemail. I pay $20 a month plus $0.10 a minute with unlimited texting, call display and voicemail; it doesn't get much better considering how little I talk. Not sure about their data plans though. I just can't see why people get 3-year phone plans... crazy.
My older brother is the design head for the University of Saskatchewan team, the front-runners of the past competitions. Suffice to say they're really excited about it, since this competition has been delayed month by month since about a year ago! It'll be neat to see everything actually all come together.
You can watch a sweet (if cheesy) video about the team on their website.
Any ideas that I have are, to a considerable (possibly entire) extent, inspired or formed by the ideas that I've been exposed to prior to coming up with "my own" ideas. Really, when you think about it, can any creator take 100% credit for whatever it is they produce? Take philosophy for example, when someone writes up a book with some new philosophical theory, it's guaranteed that the ideas of philosophers going back centuries contributed to the new work.
Maybe the best example is chord progressions and jazz music. A whole pile of great jazz tunes were based on the chord progressions of songs by old timers like Gershwin - jazz artists would take the exact same chords, write new melodies, and improvise great tunes out of them. Imagine though, if copyright law had included chord progressions - jazz music as an art form would likely not exist. And really, why shouldn't chord progressions be copyrighted too? After all, Gershwin came up with some great ones. But the loss to society and culture would have been severe (although nobody would have noticed at the time). And at the same time, Gershwin when he wrote those chords would have been inspired by the musicians of his time that he listened to. So jazz musicians ripped off Gershwin (and other tin pan alley composers), and these guys ripped off previous composers, and society benefited enormously from all of that.
That's something that's all the more apparent today, since something created in one part of the world can be immediately visible worldwide, and won't be forgotten for years. For culture to grow and thrive, you need to be able to rip off, build on, and be inspired by the artists, creators, and inventors that came before you or are your contemporaries. That doesn't happen nowadays.
But the idea itself? You don't deserve to be paid just because you thought about something and put it on paper.
Well, maybe paid a little for putting together previous creators' ideas in a new combination. But in exchange, you have to let other people do the same with yours.
This is something that was *very* important to Gene Roddenberry. IIRC, he was very upset at some background voiceover chatter in the first film about a Starfleet dreadnought.
Mod parent up!:) To me, this has always been one of the coolest (and most unique) things about Star Trek. It's cheesy I know, but the conception of a (relatively) peaceful, hopeful future where the heroes were more so explorers and ambassadors and less so warriors - that's really cool. Especially keeping in mind that this was made in the thick of the cold war, where a lot of people thought there might not be any humans left in two decades. That whole concept has kind of been lost in more recent Star Trek ("Enterprise", mostly) and maybe SF in general, which partly makes sense since it doesn't make for really exciting television, that's for sure.
But still. The thought of an optimistic, bright future universe is really something. Props to Gene Roddenberry for being ahead of the curve on that one.
Holy cow - thanks for writing this! That's really something. I hope the other post (about you being on the wrong site) was being fascetious - consider me among the Slashdotters genuinely interested in what you're saying here. Keep it coming.
Actually, the company that makes it (MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates' space division) was very almostly sold to a US defense contractor last spring. Which would kind of have sucked for Canada's space industry, since that company is basically...our only one.
So really - back off, get your own robot space arms! : ) Cool, thanks, eh?
A bit of canadian history - in the late 50s, Canada had developed the world's most advanced jet interceptor (the Avro Arrow). When it was cancelled in 1958, almost every single scientist and engineer working on it moved to the States to work on the US space program. The Canadian aeronautical industry never recovered (but at least we can take credit for all the cool stuff NASA did in the 60s!). People really worry that if MDA Space ever gets sold off, the same thing will happen again.
http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2008/04/10/mdablock.html
What do you mean Armada couldn't be officially released?
Sorry - I meant if Activision wanted to release the source code for it now (or if anyone wanted them to) they wouldn't be able to work it out with Paramount. I imagine that most abandonware games die that way. You're right though - definitely was officially released, and highly popular.:) And then gone.
No doubt - which is tragic.
My two favorite computer games (by far) are Fighters Anthology (1997), and Star Trek: Armada (2000). Just absolutely phenomenal games.:)
But the first was abandoned when EA disbanded its military-simulation division ("Jane's"), and Armada was completely abandoned after a legal dispute between Activision and Paramount (one day, all the Armada-related materials on the website just disappeared).
On second thought, that's probably why games like Armada couldn't be officially released - too much of a copyright hurdle between Activision's code, and Paramount's art/storyline/characters/etc. But it's nice to dream that they could be; both Armada and Fighters Anthology still have active modding communities (and that's saying something with FA, which had no mod tools) a decade later. Imagine what people could do with the full sources. They're good games; it's a shame that they'll eventually just be forgotten and lost forever.
If I was a game developer, I'd want to snag a copy of all the source code just as a product finished, so I could share it around a decade later and see what happens.
Canada too - it really is interesting. Not a week after having won the election (where they campaigned on their economic responsibility and prowess), the Conservative government here released a number of reports showing that the state of the economy was far worse off than expected. Some say that they knew for a long time, and called a quick election* so they could be re-elected before people realized how bad things were.
The sad part is, I can't see any of our political parties *not* doing the same thing if they had been in power. Canadian democracy is a downer.
* It's pretty funny - while we've been watching the US election run-up for pretty much 3 years, we can pull off a Canadian election in a month and a week between announcement and election. All my friends here watched the US debates instead of the Canadian ones. : )
Simply tossing a technological measure at a community won't magically fix things.
Exactly. I have a bunch of friends big into EWB-Canada - there's some really interesting stories (that they think are both funny...and a bit embarrassing) about the organization's first few years where they genuinely believed straight-up tech was the complete answer. Nowadays they joke about it a lot.
Over the last 6 or 7 years EWB (Canada*) has had a major shift from those top-down 'western engineering solutions will save Africa' ideas to focusing on understanding people's actual needs there. Volunteer projects involve working within local organizations and helping them become more effective, since these local initiatives are far more successful than a lot of uninformed western projects. But it's almost surprising that after 40 years of development work in Africa, that this (empowering locals!) is only now a new approach. As an afterthought it seems kind of obvious, but it's actually a whole mind-shift away from the traditional ideas of western development.
* This is apparently a major different between EWB-Canada and EWB-USA, in that while they started as very similar-minded organizations, EWB-Canada has changed to a lot more understanding-local-people-focused, less technical-solution-focused approach. (At least from talking to EWB-Canada people... who all seem -way- cool.) But not to criticize EWB-USA too much.:) In both groups' cases, they're doing what they can to help people in developing countries improve their lives - and that's pretty friggin' awesome.
It's great to see (reading the NY Times article) that this summit includes people from developing countries. Often, these sorts of things just involve people from developed countries dreaming up 'solutions' that sound awesome but wouldn't actually work on the ground, because the focus is only on the technologies and there isn't enough understanding of the people and societies in the developing countries or areas the technology is meant for.
I talked to a volunteer with Engineers Without Borders Canada who had this crazy story about rural villages in Mali (in western Africa). In almost every single town he visited (poor farming villages, actually) there was a deep, covered well and pump providing clean, healthy drinking water. And nobody used them. Instead, women from the villages would walk a few kilometres to collect water from a stagnant, parasite-infected pool of water.
Which seems ridiculous to us, maybe, except that collecting water by the pool was an important social event for these women (that standing in line at the well didn't duplicate at all), and that people thought the metal of the pump was unnatural - especially compared to a water source 'in nature', and that no one had really convinced the families in these villages that water from the pump would make their babies more likely to survive.
But it really goes to show that the best-intended engineering or technical solutions (in this case, a foreign NGO's decision a decade or two ago that every Malian village needed a water pump) won't succeed without a better understanding of the people they are meant to help. And that in the end, developing countries will never "make it" because of solutions 'handed down' by first-world organizations; in the end people there need to be empowered to improve their lives and their countries. First-world organizations can help with that, but we can't pretend to understand their communities' needs better than they do.
Aside from java/activeX ewwy-ness, there's also a Flash+JS (oh great, eh?) upload library - that apparently works really well and downgrades nicely if users don't have either flash or javascript. I haven't tried it myself, but it comes highly recommended: http://swfupload.org/
I'm working on a home automation project and we've been looking for an OSS, linux-compatible speech rec system, but it seemed like every single Linux speech project died in the early 2000s when IBM sold their freeware ViaVoice system and the new company started charging for it. Seems like every single Linux project used it as the backend. The only other option was CMU's Sphinx work which looked impressive but almost impossible for non-speech-experts to use directly. This will be really cool to try out - kudos to everyone working on simon.
Slashdot Mirror
Been a /. watcher for years, but only now thought I'd participate :)
Welcome! : ) And happy holidays.
Nice! Is it possible to get just the stickers, for cheaper? :)
Check out Orbiter - without a doubt the most realistic (and incredible) space flight simulator around. My little brother has basically taught himself orbital mechanics using Orbiter and online tutorials for the game (if you can call it that!) The real deal - Hohmann transfer orbits and spaceflight mechanics-type concepts I'd never heard of.
When I saw "the space game", I thought for sure they were talking about Orbiter. If "designing your own route to Jupiter" is something you're interested in, do yourself a favour and check it out.
I sometimes wonder if perhaps government needs another wing,
an executive, a legislature, a judiciary and another wing(investigative?) with the job of (but not monopoly on)letting everyone know what the hell the other 3 are up to
I'm often surprised (and impressed) by how well the CBC here in Canada and the BBC in the UK objectively report on government actions and policies. Both of them are government-owned entities, but they seem to provide a much more critical lens on that very government than the private commercial news broadcasters do. It's really counter-intuitive.
Copyright and wrong
Why the rules on copyright need to return to their roots
Apr 8th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
WHEN Parliament decided, in 1709, to create a law that would protect books from piracy, the London-based publishers and booksellers who had been pushing for such protection were overjoyed. When Queen Anne gave her assent on April 10th the following year—300 years ago this week—to “An act for the encouragement of learning” they were less enthused. Parliament had given them rights, but it had set a time limit on them: 21 years for books already in print and 14 years for new ones, with an additional 14 years if the author was still alive when the first term ran out. After that, the material would enter the public domain so that anyone could reproduce it. The lawmakers intended thus to balance the incentive to create with the interest that society has in free access to knowledge and art. The Statute of Anne thus helped nurture and channel the spate of inventiveness that Enlightenment society and its successors have since enjoyed.
Over the past 50 years, however, that balance has shifted. Largely thanks to the entertainment industry’s lawyers and lobbyists, copyright’s scope and duration have vastly increased. In America, copyright holders get 95 years’ protection as a result of an extension granted in 1998, derided by critics as the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act”. They are now calling for even greater protection, and there have been efforts to introduce similar terms in Europe. Such arguments should be resisted: it is time to tip the balance back.
Annie get your gun
Lengthy protection, it is argued, increases the incentive to create. Digital technology seems to strengthen the argument: by making copying easier, it seems to demand greater protection in return. The idea of extending copyright also has a moral appeal. Intellectual property can seem very like real property, especially when it is yours, and not some faceless corporation’s. As a result people feel that once they own it—especially if they have made it—they should go on owning it, much as they would a house that they could pass on to their descendants. On this reading, protection should be perpetual. Ratcheting up the time limit on a regular basis becomes a reasonable way of approximating that perpetuity.
The notion that lengthening copyright increases creativity is questionable, however. Authors and artists do not generally consult the statute books before deciding whether or not to pick up pen or paintbrush. And overlong copyrights often limit, rather than encourage, a work’s dissemination, impact and influence. It can be difficult to locate copyright holders to obtain the rights to reuse old material. As a result, much content ends up in legal limbo (and in the case of old movies and sound recordings, is left to deteriorate—copying them in order to preserve them may constitute an act of infringement). The penalties even for inadvertent infringement are so punishing that creators routinely have to self-censor their work. Nor does the advent of digital technology strengthen the case for extending the period of protection. Copyright protection is needed partly to cover the costs of creating and distributing works in physical form. Digital technology slashes such costs, and thus reduces the argument for protection.
The moral case, although easy to sympathise with, is a way of trying to have one’s cake and eat it. Copyright was originally the grant of a temporary government-supported monopoly on copying a work, not a property right. From 1710 onwards, it has involved a deal in which the creator or publisher gives up any natural and perp
http://lumberjaph.net/blog/index.php/2010/03/25/github-explorer/
(Franck Cuny's actual site) Looks like really interesting stuff!
Are you joking? You think the "insurgents" are doing this because they just enjoy war for its own sake?
Mod parent up. Everyone wants to end the war (any war); each side just wants it to end in a particular way.
Thanks for sharing! Your comments on this story are really interesting to read.
Virgin Mobile here in Canada is (i'm guessing) the same idea; they use other carriers' towers, you buy the phone at Wal-Mart.
And seriously (not to be a shill) but their pre-paid service is vastly cheaper than any of the competition where I live (Saskatchewan). I thought the prices were pretty comparable, then I realized the other providers add service and 911 fees on top of the prices they advertise, and charge that much again for call display or voicemail. I pay $20 a month plus $0.10 a minute with unlimited texting, call display and voicemail; it doesn't get much better considering how little I talk. Not sure about their data plans though. I just can't see why people get 3-year phone plans... crazy.
And for web devs, the Web Developer Toolbar and Firebug people. Those guys are total heroes.
Mod parent up! The gizmodo article is fantastic.
My older brother is the design head for the University of Saskatchewan team, the front-runners of the past competitions. Suffice to say they're really excited about it, since this competition has been delayed month by month since about a year ago! It'll be neat to see everything actually all come together.
You can watch a sweet (if cheesy) video about the team on their website.
I'm surprised there isn't more talk of Jamendo on Slashdot. That site is awesome. Ridiculous amounts of Creative Commons-licensed music.
people should have ownership over ideas
I disagree.
Any ideas that I have are, to a considerable (possibly entire) extent, inspired or formed by the ideas that I've been exposed to prior to coming up with "my own" ideas. Really, when you think about it, can any creator take 100% credit for whatever it is they produce? Take philosophy for example, when someone writes up a book with some new philosophical theory, it's guaranteed that the ideas of philosophers going back centuries contributed to the new work.
Maybe the best example is chord progressions and jazz music. A whole pile of great jazz tunes were based on the chord progressions of songs by old timers like Gershwin - jazz artists would take the exact same chords, write new melodies, and improvise great tunes out of them. Imagine though, if copyright law had included chord progressions - jazz music as an art form would likely not exist. And really, why shouldn't chord progressions be copyrighted too? After all, Gershwin came up with some great ones. But the loss to society and culture would have been severe (although nobody would have noticed at the time). And at the same time, Gershwin when he wrote those chords would have been inspired by the musicians of his time that he listened to. So jazz musicians ripped off Gershwin (and other tin pan alley composers), and these guys ripped off previous composers, and society benefited enormously from all of that.
That's something that's all the more apparent today, since something created in one part of the world can be immediately visible worldwide, and won't be forgotten for years. For culture to grow and thrive, you need to be able to rip off, build on, and be inspired by the artists, creators, and inventors that came before you or are your contemporaries. That doesn't happen nowadays.
But the idea itself? You don't deserve to be paid just because you thought about something and put it on paper.
Well, maybe paid a little for putting together previous creators' ideas in a new combination. But in exchange, you have to let other people do the same with yours.
Also, a bizarre but fascinating exploration of perpetual copyright and the future, by Spider Robinson: http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html
This is something that was *very* important to Gene Roddenberry. IIRC, he was very upset at some background voiceover chatter in the first film about a Starfleet dreadnought.
Mod parent up! :) To me, this has always been one of the coolest (and most unique) things about Star Trek. It's cheesy I know, but the conception of a (relatively) peaceful, hopeful future where the heroes were more so explorers and ambassadors and less so warriors - that's really cool. Especially keeping in mind that this was made in the thick of the cold war, where a lot of people thought there might not be any humans left in two decades. That whole concept has kind of been lost in more recent Star Trek ("Enterprise", mostly) and maybe SF in general, which partly makes sense since it doesn't make for really exciting television, that's for sure.
But still. The thought of an optimistic, bright future universe is really something. Props to Gene Roddenberry for being ahead of the curve on that one.
On the other hand, I suppose the Canadians could have finally snapped.
No F-16s for us here in Canada, just CF-18s. Unless they're American, and visiting here on joint exercises.
Holy cow - thanks for writing this! That's really something. I hope the other post (about you being on the wrong site) was being fascetious - consider me among the Slashdotters genuinely interested in what you're saying here. Keep it coming.
Actually, the company that makes it (MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates' space division) was very almostly sold to a US defense contractor last spring. Which would kind of have sucked for Canada's space industry, since that company is basically ...our only one.
So really - back off, get your own robot space arms! : ) Cool, thanks, eh?
A bit of canadian history - in the late 50s, Canada had developed the world's most advanced jet interceptor (the Avro Arrow). When it was cancelled in 1958, almost every single scientist and engineer working on it moved to the States to work on the US space program. The Canadian aeronautical industry never recovered (but at least we can take credit for all the cool stuff NASA did in the 60s!). People really worry that if MDA Space ever gets sold off, the same thing will happen again.
http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2008/04/10/mdablock.html
What do you mean Armada couldn't be officially released?
Sorry - I meant if Activision wanted to release the source code for it now (or if anyone wanted them to) they wouldn't be able to work it out with Paramount. I imagine that most abandonware games die that way. You're right though - definitely was officially released, and highly popular. :) And then gone.
No doubt - which is tragic. :)
My two favorite computer games (by far) are Fighters Anthology (1997), and Star Trek: Armada (2000). Just absolutely phenomenal games.
But the first was abandoned when EA disbanded its military-simulation division ("Jane's"), and Armada was completely abandoned after a legal dispute between Activision and Paramount (one day, all the Armada-related materials on the website just disappeared).
On second thought, that's probably why games like Armada couldn't be officially released - too much of a copyright hurdle between Activision's code, and Paramount's art/storyline/characters/etc. But it's nice to dream that they could be; both Armada and Fighters Anthology still have active modding communities (and that's saying something with FA, which had no mod tools) a decade later. Imagine what people could do with the full sources. They're good games; it's a shame that they'll eventually just be forgotten and lost forever.
If I was a game developer, I'd want to snag a copy of all the source code just as a product finished, so I could share it around a decade later and see what happens.
Canada too - it really is interesting. Not a week after having won the election (where they campaigned on their economic responsibility and prowess), the Conservative government here released a number of reports showing that the state of the economy was far worse off than expected. Some say that they knew for a long time, and called a quick election* so they could be re-elected before people realized how bad things were.
The sad part is, I can't see any of our political parties *not* doing the same thing if they had been in power. Canadian democracy is a downer.
* It's pretty funny - while we've been watching the US election run-up for pretty much 3 years, we can pull off a Canadian election in a month and a week between announcement and election. All my friends here watched the US debates instead of the Canadian ones. : )
Simply tossing a technological measure at a community won't magically fix things.
Exactly. I have a bunch of friends big into EWB-Canada - there's some really interesting stories (that they think are both funny ...and a bit embarrassing) about the organization's first few years where they genuinely believed straight-up tech was the complete answer. Nowadays they joke about it a lot.
:) In both groups' cases, they're doing what they can to help people in developing countries improve their lives - and that's pretty friggin' awesome.
Over the last 6 or 7 years EWB (Canada*) has had a major shift from those top-down 'western engineering solutions will save Africa' ideas to focusing on understanding people's actual needs there. Volunteer projects involve working within local organizations and helping them become more effective, since these local initiatives are far more successful than a lot of uninformed western projects. But it's almost surprising that after 40 years of development work in Africa, that this (empowering locals!) is only now a new approach. As an afterthought it seems kind of obvious, but it's actually a whole mind-shift away from the traditional ideas of western development.
* This is apparently a major different between EWB-Canada and EWB-USA, in that while they started as very similar-minded organizations, EWB-Canada has changed to a lot more understanding-local-people-focused, less technical-solution-focused approach. (At least from talking to EWB-Canada people... who all seem -way- cool.) But not to criticize EWB-USA too much.
It's great to see (reading the NY Times article) that this summit includes people from developing countries. Often, these sorts of things just involve people from developed countries dreaming up 'solutions' that sound awesome but wouldn't actually work on the ground, because the focus is only on the technologies and there isn't enough understanding of the people and societies in the developing countries or areas the technology is meant for.
I talked to a volunteer with Engineers Without Borders Canada who had this crazy story about rural villages in Mali (in western Africa). In almost every single town he visited (poor farming villages, actually) there was a deep, covered well and pump providing clean, healthy drinking water. And nobody used them. Instead, women from the villages would walk a few kilometres to collect water from a stagnant, parasite-infected pool of water.
Which seems ridiculous to us, maybe, except that collecting water by the pool was an important social event for these women (that standing in line at the well didn't duplicate at all), and that people thought the metal of the pump was unnatural - especially compared to a water source 'in nature', and that no one had really convinced the families in these villages that water from the pump would make their babies more likely to survive.
But it really goes to show that the best-intended engineering or technical solutions (in this case, a foreign NGO's decision a decade or two ago that every Malian village needed a water pump) won't succeed without a better understanding of the people they are meant to help. And that in the end, developing countries will never "make it" because of solutions 'handed down' by first-world organizations; in the end people there need to be empowered to improve their lives and their countries. First-world organizations can help with that, but we can't pretend to understand their communities' needs better than they do.
Aside from java/activeX ewwy-ness, there's also a Flash+JS (oh great, eh?) upload library - that apparently works really well and downgrades nicely if users don't have either flash or javascript. I haven't tried it myself, but it comes highly recommended: http://swfupload.org/
I'm working on a home automation project and we've been looking for an OSS, linux-compatible speech rec system, but it seemed like every single Linux speech project died in the early 2000s when IBM sold their freeware ViaVoice system and the new company started charging for it. Seems like every single Linux project used it as the backend. The only other option was CMU's Sphinx work which looked impressive but almost impossible for non-speech-experts to use directly. This will be really cool to try out - kudos to everyone working on simon.