Indeed. As a graduate student in the US I had to take a test of English as a foreign language though I had spoken it most of my life and scored in the top 1% on the GRE in English. I am Irish. I gather a Canadian would have had to take the test also, which seemed strange at the time. I realized later that it may have been because some of those cheese-eating descendants of surrender monkeys might well have been Francophones (you know, people with French phones).
Had I been grading the test I'd have failed anyone who wrote "a bunch of countries".
> Couldn't he just stop paying the bill
I moved from Europe to the far east a few years ago and tried to cancel a Compuserve account I'd had since living in the US. It dated back to 1983 when I was one of the first 200,000 users (I lived in Ohio and I knew people there). It took me something like two years of repeated letter writing, emails and phone calls to finally get it shut down. American Express were unable to stop it being billed and processed.
If you Googled Jeff Hawtin, referred to in the story, you'd find he'd worked for the International Plant Genetic resources Institute which is part of the CGIAR, the consultative group on international agricultural research. Check here http://www.cgiar.org/centers/index.html/ a map of the world with the research centers of the CGIAR on it. Take a look. The CGIAR holds the gene banks of the world's major food crops in trust for humanity under UN auspices. You'll find potatos in Peru, rice in the Philippines, wheat and maize in Mexico etc. There are good biogeographic reasons why the institutes are where they are. One CGIAR institute, WARDA, the West African Rice Development Association, has had to move 3 times because of civil unrest, from Liberia to the Ivory Coast two years ago, from there to Nigeria (temporarily), from there, recently, to Benin. The Philippines has had several coups and attempted coups. Other countries where CGIAR institues and gene banks are located include Colombia and Nigeria.
Your taxes help support the CGIAR and the sustain the gene banks of the world's most important food crops to the tune of $500m a year. It would be a shame if the billions invested were to be lost. About half of the world's population eats rice; 2 in 3 in Asia get most of their calories from rice. Half of the rice grown today was bred using materials from the rice gene bank of the International Rice Research Institute. If the gene bank of a major food crop was lost the loss to humanity would be incalculable, and the potential future consequences could include widespread famine, political unrest, large scale human migration and environmental destruction. For an insight into the economic importance of the CGIAR see the article on wheat in the recent issue of the Economist (Story of Man on the cover, or click here http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm? story_id=5323362&no_na_tran=1/). Norman Borlaug, featured in that article, works at the CGIAR's wheat and maize institute, still, in his 90s.
As a recent profile of Gurdev Khush, a rice scientist, put it: his name may not have passed your lips but his work certainly has.
The CGIAR doesn't have any gene banks for oak trees, though it does have two forestry institutes. Oak is a temperate climate tree found in Northern latitudes not known for political instability. The future of the world's climate, the security of its food supply, biodiversity and any prospects of world peace are largely in the hands of the world's poor living in developing countries. People who don't have enough to eat today don't worry about tomorrow. Lucky for us all the Norwegians are enlightened people. Likewise other supporters of Global Crop Diversity Trust.
Indeed. Many years ago I approached an Allied Irish Bank ATM in Dublin behind a seemingly confused old lady who was waiting for the ATM to do something. Suddenly her card was ejected with force and a voice from inside said
I have used all of these (except Dotster) and more: namecheap, domain people and others. The idea that network solutions offers value for money is surely a joke. Do you hold stock in this company by any chance?
Currently, I use and recommend GoDaddy. It went through a bad patch for a while--for anyone living outside the US in particular. Now it works well and it's good value. It also seems to be an ethical company. I moved all my domains away from Network Solutions when they started sending bogus renewals to customers of competitors--voting with my feet. Monopolies are bad for business. Unethical monopolies are worst of all.
A friend of mine claims he was told very emphatically once in a country that will remain nameless that "there will be no justice until we have flea erections"
The moral of the story is that there are such things a physical tokens, smartcards, etc that can provide keys to authentiate people to access computer systems. I hate to break it to you, but username/password schemes only authenticate usernames and passwords.
Hello? Physical tokens authenticate physical tokens--unless combined with something known only to the authorized user (two factor authentication).
I installed a fiber optic network to connect up about 50 homes and 3 apartment buildings on the campus of a research institute some years ago--in a tropical, developing country. The distances from the main distribution frame (MDF, or central point) were such that copper wasn't an option. We used 4 core 50 micron fiber to each building and put two ports in place using 3M Volition gear (one upstairs and one downstairs). Each port was connected to a 3M volition switch, each of which had a single mode connection back to the research center several km away. Neither wireless nor DSL were options at the time in the country, nor are they still. Later wifi was and still is used domestically by many of the scientists. The phone system uses the (gigabit) single mode fiber link also (all fibers buried btw, in plastic pipes on gravel and with warning tapes).
Lessons: Volition v sensitive to dirt, dust and ants and needed a bit more maintenance than originally expected (switches in airconditioned MDF perfectly ok though). Fiber optic network cards for PCs were disappointing and caused problems with some machines. Gigabit fiber optic cards are still not readily available--though transceivers are. If I was doing it again I'd forget fiber to the desk and put in a transceiver (needed for laptops anyway) and run Cat5 to every room from the Light Interface Unit. Transceivers are costly and fairly susceptible to getting zapped by voltage anomalies (lots of lightning and power outages).
BTW each volition switch connects to a different data center, each with its own ISP and broadband link, and they're cross connected with load balancing hardware (Raritan Linkproof) to maximize uptime.
In the Netherlands (where I used to live) I think you must by now be able to get a good DSL solution (it was all ISDN when I left). Do a search on DSL and multi-occupancy and you'll find some suppliers. I would TENDER FOR A SOLUTION and include maintenance of any central equipment and get a good service level agreement. You don't want to have a de facto IT dept for 30 homes.
Search on CEDIA. You may find companies that can offer a solution or help you develop a statement of requirements. Veel geluk!
Not just an inability to end. While Cryptonomicon was in many ways a great yarn it could have done with some serious editing. So much so that I doubt I'll read any more books by Stephenson until they are published in abridged form. His prolixity, apparent mission to educate (hard to distinquish from pointlessly flaunted erudition at times) is, in the end, insufferable--if you value your time. I do. A pity really. I read Cryptonomicon in the Philippines after having lived there for a few years, so it had some added resonance.
His article in Wired on the wiring of the planet was by far the best thing I ever read in Wired [http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.h tml] and I'd be surprised if it was NOT professionally edited. I am sure I was not the only person to find it by reading raves about it in the next issue (who has time to REALLY read Wired regularly?). I found waiting for the feedback a useful pointer to what was worth readng.
Four learned fellows are on a train traveling through Scotland, each trying to outdo the other in being factual and precise.
At one stage, the first looks out the window, and spying an animal on the field nearby, claims, "All the sheep in Scotland are white!"
The second replies, "No, SOME of the sheep in Scotland are white."
The third retorts, "No, AT LEAST ONE of the sheep in Scotland is white."
They all look at the fourth, daring him to improve on the last statement.
He thinks for a second, and replies, "At least one of the sheep in Scotland is white ON ONE SIDE."
While this exchange is going on, a fifth man is walking through the train car. He overhears the exchange and stops. He looks out the window, sees the sheep disappear in the distance, and says quietly, "At least one of the sheep in Scotland is white on one side part of the time."
This comment is completely ludicrous. First, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is not a PR stunt (nor is it a vehicle for pushing Microsoft products). Gates as a philanthropist has given enormous amounts of money for the elimination of disease in developing countries, effectively by taxing developed country software consumers. It does not give money "to the poor and hungry" --at least not directly.
Second, people in developing countries are generally more concerned about having their children survive, preferably in good health, not living long enough to have children.
Finally, just because people are hungry or poor in a country doesn't mean that free software shouldn't be espoused. On the contrary. Why should foreign exchange be spent buying software if alternatives can be obtained for free, localized faster and better supported.
Try getting support for a US-originated software package in a developing country sometime. Check the price of phone calls in Ethiopia e.g., I think you'll find that the per minute rate approximates the daily wage of the taxi driver referred to in the article. That's before you get asked what state Ethiopia is in. Before you are told that you have to deal with reseller X (who is incompetent and charges double or triple US prices). Perhaps also before you find that you can't subscribe for updates because you don't have a credit card or, if you do, that the transaction is not acceptable because it MUST be fraudulent.
Before calling people zealots maybe it would be an idea to get a clue about the real difficulties of using commercial software in poor countries.
Gates is the unacceptable face of capitalism to many. But, his (and his wife's) charitable giving through their foundation is spectacular and will likely have a huge impact in selected areas. A ruthlessly collected global tax on software with the proceeds spent on the problems of the poorest of the poor is a hell of an idea, oh, and it makes lots of people very wealthy. OSS may in the end be a better idea. It will be interesting to see. Meanwhile, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation brings to philanthropy some the same hard-nosed performance driving business practices of Microsoft and it does so without being a trojan horse for Microsoft Corporation.
The Arabs have a saying that you can only take with you what you have given away. So I have some bad news for those who hate Bill Gates. There's a good chance he'll be the richest man in heaven too!
Re:Beautiful Women tend to be Horrible People
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 1
Damn, I was about to be impressed by a slashdotter who could actually spell!
condescending, manipulative, deceptive, scheming, hurtful, uncaring, duplicitous...
but then
Duplicitousnous is key
Duplicity I think. Perhaps slashdotters are "genetically predispositioned" to be unable to spell "predisposed."
Slashdotters can't spell for toffee. There are, of course, wonderful exceptions, exceptionally wonderful and accurate spellers, but I've found the generalization above to be depressingly true.
> getting such cooperation is well nigh impossible
This is quite true and it'd be a waste of time trying. A better approach, surely, is to come up with a new approach (technically) and to get a nucleus of support for it and then extend this, with incentives.
For a country to join the EU it has to be democratic and meet certain standards in laundry list of areas, from human rights to food processing, corporate accounting, data protection and many other standards. EU accession is a BIG incentive for countries to clean up practices that are not up to par internationally. Compatibility and reciprocity are the guiding principles here and in many other arenas, including IP routing. So why not email?
A new technical standard that would make spam harder to send--some proposals have been publicised recently--and incentives for adoption (such as slowing or dropping all traffic from jurisdictions that haven't adopted it) would suffice.
The Irish Republic's "we're not Britain" complex is quite ancient and predates the idea of Britain; the Romans never reached Ireland and it retained a separate cultural identity despite a long history of efforts over hundreds of years to change it forcibly. And there's rather more to it than "no taxation without representation"
Citizens of Republics are generally proud of the fact that the have no monarchy, no established church, and no hereditary privilege (all citizens are born equal--no "Lords" or hereditary peers). The Irish Republic is one such, like America. It would be FAR more accurate to say that American national identity is defined by a "we're not British" sentiment.
The Christmas issue of the Economist had an interesting comparison between how well Kings and Queens of England++ (ie., and of whatever else they ruled at the time) stacked up against US Presidents. Guess who comes out on top!:-)
Anyway, the Republic of Ireland is an independent country. Get over it.
I disagree.
But then I commit the crime of being an expatriate living in the Philippines. The entire country, and many nearby countries and Hong Kong, have all been redlined by godaddy and web traffic is simply blocked 'due to high levels of credit card fraud'.
I tried to negotiate on this: I have registered many domains. I use the same fixed IP address registered to a well known international organization where i work. No luck. I found myself dealing with people incapable of reading English or with any understanding of their own business. They were simply following scripts and hoping for the best. I was advised to login to GoDaddy and do various things to move my domain elsewhere. Excuse me, but this is not possible if web traffic from the entire country is blocked.
Of course there are ways around this idiotic policy and every credit card crook worth his salt can use them.
Godaddy offers good value but their cross selling attempts border on the hysterical. If you value being able to communicate at any time with an intelligent life form my advice is to go elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. As a graduate student in the US I had to take a test of English as a foreign language though I had spoken it most of my life and scored in the top 1% on the GRE in English. I am Irish. I gather a Canadian would have had to take the test also, which seemed strange at the time. I realized later that it may have been because some of those cheese-eating descendants of surrender monkeys might well have been Francophones (you know, people with French phones). Had I been grading the test I'd have failed anyone who wrote "a bunch of countries".
With Boot Camp Windows can soon infect Macs.
> Couldn't he just stop paying the bill I moved from Europe to the far east a few years ago and tried to cancel a Compuserve account I'd had since living in the US. It dated back to 1983 when I was one of the first 200,000 users (I lived in Ohio and I knew people there). It took me something like two years of repeated letter writing, emails and phone calls to finally get it shut down. American Express were unable to stop it being billed and processed.
Keyboard got a cold? Or did you mean reportING from WellINGton about XXX sites where you see a lot of things endING in ING
Your taxes help support the CGIAR and the sustain the gene banks of the world's most important food crops to the tune of $500m a year. It would be a shame if the billions invested were to be lost. About half of the world's population eats rice; 2 in 3 in Asia get most of their calories from rice. Half of the rice grown today was bred using materials from the rice gene bank of the International Rice Research Institute. If the gene bank of a major food crop was lost the loss to humanity would be incalculable, and the potential future consequences could include widespread famine, political unrest, large scale human migration and environmental destruction. For an insight into the economic importance of the CGIAR see the article on wheat in the recent issue of the Economist (Story of Man on the cover, or click here http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm? story_id=5323362&no_na_tran=1/). Norman Borlaug, featured in that article, works at the CGIAR's wheat and maize institute, still, in his 90s.
As a recent profile of Gurdev Khush, a rice scientist, put it: his name may not have passed your lips but his work certainly has.
The CGIAR doesn't have any gene banks for oak trees, though it does have two forestry institutes. Oak is a temperate climate tree found in Northern latitudes not known for political instability. The future of the world's climate, the security of its food supply, biodiversity and any prospects of world peace are largely in the hands of the world's poor living in developing countries. People who don't have enough to eat today don't worry about tomorrow. Lucky for us all the Norwegians are enlightened people. Likewise other supporters of Global Crop Diversity Trust.
Two minutes here is all you'll need to understand why it matters http://www.croptrust.org/items/homepage.php/.
The fact that Kelman's capitalization is specifically mentioned: Rogue Bank may provide a clue. Or maybe not.
Indeed. Many years ago I approached an Allied Irish Bank ATM in Dublin behind a seemingly confused old lady who was waiting for the ATM to do something. Suddenly her card was ejected with force and a voice from inside said
I SAID FUCK OFF!!
Use a ramdrive. Nothing to do. They delete themselves. Or blackhole them in the first place. See http://everythingisnt.com/hosts.html
Whatever it is they are flattered by imitation. Seems to me that R2D2 and C3pio are sugared shades of the daleks and the cybermen!
And... don't forget... the world is running out of Internet addresses scare
I have used all of these (except Dotster) and more: namecheap, domain people and others. The idea that network solutions offers value for money is surely a joke. Do you hold stock in this company by any chance? Currently, I use and recommend GoDaddy. It went through a bad patch for a while--for anyone living outside the US in particular. Now it works well and it's good value. It also seems to be an ethical company. I moved all my domains away from Network Solutions when they started sending bogus renewals to customers of competitors--voting with my feet. Monopolies are bad for business. Unethical monopolies are worst of all.
A friend of mine claims he was told very emphatically once in a country that will remain nameless that "there will be no justice until we have flea erections"
The mouse was invented by Doug Engelbart (and called an X-Y position indicator)
hello?
Hello? Physical tokens authenticate physical tokens--unless combined with something known only to the authorized user (two factor authentication).
I installed a fiber optic network to connect up about 50 homes and 3 apartment buildings on the campus of a research institute some years ago--in a tropical, developing country. The distances from the main distribution frame (MDF, or central point) were such that copper wasn't an option. We used 4 core 50 micron fiber to each building and put two ports in place using 3M Volition gear (one upstairs and one downstairs). Each port was connected to a 3M volition switch, each of which had a single mode connection back to the research center several km away. Neither wireless nor DSL were options at the time in the country, nor are they still. Later wifi was and still is used domestically by many of the scientists. The phone system uses the (gigabit) single mode fiber link also (all fibers buried btw, in plastic pipes on gravel and with warning tapes).
Lessons: Volition v sensitive to dirt, dust and ants and needed a bit more maintenance than originally expected (switches in airconditioned MDF perfectly ok though). Fiber optic network cards for PCs were disappointing and caused problems with some machines. Gigabit fiber optic cards are still not readily available--though transceivers are. If I was doing it again I'd forget fiber to the desk and put in a transceiver (needed for laptops anyway) and run Cat5 to every room from the Light Interface Unit. Transceivers are costly and fairly susceptible to getting zapped by voltage anomalies (lots of lightning and power outages).
BTW each volition switch connects to a different data center, each with its own ISP and broadband link, and they're cross connected with load balancing hardware (Raritan Linkproof) to maximize uptime.
In the Netherlands (where I used to live) I think you must by now be able to get a good DSL solution (it was all ISDN when I left). Do a search on DSL and multi-occupancy and you'll find some suppliers. I would TENDER FOR A SOLUTION and include maintenance of any central equipment and get a good service level agreement. You don't want to have a de facto IT dept for 30 homes.
Search on CEDIA. You may find companies that can offer a solution or help you develop a statement of requirements. Veel geluk!
Not just an inability to end. While Cryptonomicon was in many ways a great yarn it could have done with some serious editing. So much so that I doubt I'll read any more books by Stephenson until they are published in abridged form. His prolixity, apparent mission to educate (hard to distinquish from pointlessly flaunted erudition at times) is, in the end, insufferable--if you value your time. I do. A pity really. I read Cryptonomicon in the Philippines after having lived there for a few years, so it had some added resonance. His article in Wired on the wiring of the planet was by far the best thing I ever read in Wired [http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.h tml] and I'd be surprised if it was NOT professionally edited. I am sure I was not the only person to find it by reading raves about it in the next issue (who has time to REALLY read Wired regularly?). I found waiting for the feedback a useful pointer to what was worth readng.
Four learned fellows are on a train traveling through Scotland, each trying to outdo the other in being factual and precise.
At one stage, the first looks out the window, and spying an animal on the field nearby, claims, "All the sheep in Scotland are white!"
The second replies, "No, SOME of the sheep in Scotland are white."
The third retorts, "No, AT LEAST ONE of the sheep in Scotland is white."
They all look at the fourth, daring him to improve on the last statement.
He thinks for a second, and replies, "At least one of the sheep in Scotland is white ON ONE SIDE."
While this exchange is going on, a fifth man is walking through the train car. He overhears the exchange and stops. He looks out the window, sees the sheep disappear in the distance, and says quietly, "At least one of the sheep in Scotland is white on one side part of the time."
This comment is completely ludicrous. First, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is not a PR stunt (nor is it a vehicle for pushing Microsoft products). Gates as a philanthropist has given enormous amounts of money for the elimination of disease in developing countries, effectively by taxing developed country software consumers. It does not give money "to the poor and hungry" --at least not directly. Second, people in developing countries are generally more concerned about having their children survive, preferably in good health, not living long enough to have children. Finally, just because people are hungry or poor in a country doesn't mean that free software shouldn't be espoused. On the contrary. Why should foreign exchange be spent buying software if alternatives can be obtained for free, localized faster and better supported. Try getting support for a US-originated software package in a developing country sometime. Check the price of phone calls in Ethiopia e.g., I think you'll find that the per minute rate approximates the daily wage of the taxi driver referred to in the article. That's before you get asked what state Ethiopia is in. Before you are told that you have to deal with reseller X (who is incompetent and charges double or triple US prices). Perhaps also before you find that you can't subscribe for updates because you don't have a credit card or, if you do, that the transaction is not acceptable because it MUST be fraudulent. Before calling people zealots maybe it would be an idea to get a clue about the real difficulties of using commercial software in poor countries.
Een april, een april, kikke in je bil. This is what they say in the Netherlands when you have been April Fooled. Now swallow.
Gates is the unacceptable face of capitalism to many. But, his (and his wife's) charitable giving through their foundation is spectacular and will likely have a huge impact in selected areas. A ruthlessly collected global tax on software with the proceeds spent on the problems of the poorest of the poor is a hell of an idea, oh, and it makes lots of people very wealthy. OSS may in the end be a better idea. It will be interesting to see. Meanwhile, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation brings to philanthropy some the same hard-nosed performance driving business practices of Microsoft and it does so without being a trojan horse for Microsoft Corporation. The Arabs have a saying that you can only take with you what you have given away. So I have some bad news for those who hate Bill Gates. There's a good chance he'll be the richest man in heaven too!
Damn, I was about to be impressed by a slashdotter who could actually spell! condescending, manipulative, deceptive, scheming, hurtful, uncaring, duplicitous... but then Duplicitousnous is key Duplicity I think. Perhaps slashdotters are "genetically predispositioned" to be unable to spell "predisposed." Slashdotters can't spell for toffee. There are, of course, wonderful exceptions, exceptionally wonderful and accurate spellers, but I've found the generalization above to be depressingly true.
> getting such cooperation is well nigh impossible
This is quite true and it'd be a waste of time trying. A better approach, surely, is to come up with a new approach (technically) and to get a nucleus of support for it and then extend this, with incentives.
For a country to join the EU it has to be democratic and meet certain standards in laundry list of areas, from human rights to food processing, corporate accounting, data protection and many other standards. EU accession is a BIG incentive for countries to clean up practices that are not up to par internationally. Compatibility and reciprocity are the guiding principles here and in many other arenas, including IP routing. So why not email?
A new technical standard that would make spam harder to send--some proposals have been publicised recently--and incentives for adoption (such as slowing or dropping all traffic from jurisdictions that haven't adopted it) would suffice.
The Irish Republic's "we're not Britain" complex is quite ancient and predates the idea of Britain; the Romans never reached Ireland and it retained a separate cultural identity despite a long history of efforts over hundreds of years to change it forcibly. And there's rather more to it than "no taxation without representation" Citizens of Republics are generally proud of the fact that the have no monarchy, no established church, and no hereditary privilege (all citizens are born equal--no "Lords" or hereditary peers). The Irish Republic is one such, like America. It would be FAR more accurate to say that American national identity is defined by a "we're not British" sentiment. The Christmas issue of the Economist had an interesting comparison between how well Kings and Queens of England++ (ie., and of whatever else they ruled at the time) stacked up against US Presidents. Guess who comes out on top! :-)
Anyway, the Republic of Ireland is an independent country. Get over it.
I disagree. But then I commit the crime of being an expatriate living in the Philippines. The entire country, and many nearby countries and Hong Kong, have all been redlined by godaddy and web traffic is simply blocked 'due to high levels of credit card fraud'. I tried to negotiate on this: I have registered many domains. I use the same fixed IP address registered to a well known international organization where i work. No luck. I found myself dealing with people incapable of reading English or with any understanding of their own business. They were simply following scripts and hoping for the best. I was advised to login to GoDaddy and do various things to move my domain elsewhere. Excuse me, but this is not possible if web traffic from the entire country is blocked. Of course there are ways around this idiotic policy and every credit card crook worth his salt can use them. Godaddy offers good value but their cross selling attempts border on the hysterical. If you value being able to communicate at any time with an intelligent life form my advice is to go elsewhere.