I feel sad for people not on my server. Emerald Dream is an RP-PVP server (RolePlay+PVP) and world PVP is tremendous here. Our server is busy and balanced and there are several guilds, from behemoth PVP-only ones to colossal RP+PVP ones, to RP-friendly ones to small boutique dwarf-only or troll-only ones. The RP informs and invigorates our PVP and I and dozens of friends of mine would not be playing if it weren't for this server.
... my opinion is that this development is just to score political points, or, more accurately, to pre-empt your (right wing) political opponents from scoring political points. Technically, it's illegal to watch, read, store, sell, purchase, write or distribute porn, just as its illegal to urinate in the open in urban areas. But reality has little to do with the availability of porn or the practical freedom of all Indians to piss and shit wherever they feel like. Indian censorship of Internet porn sites such as this one has little to do with a government of a billion+ people feeling they have to protect the population from the reality of sex. It has a lot to do with not allowing the right wing to score easy political points and with the fact that there's no organised and public body of people calling for citizens' right to read and watch porn. Also, before you jump at it, no, reading porn is not protected under free speech laws in India.
At any rate, all I need to do is buy a cheap $4.75/mo VPS package and run a socks 5 proxy on it. Or be lazy and buy a $9 vpn service to get around it, if I could GAF. literotica.com isn't moving.
... and she likes it. She's 83 years old. And everything works just fine. Just freakin fine. Wireless, sound, DVD burner. I've been evangelising Linux since 1997 and by god, Ubuntu is getting a lot of shit absolutely freaking perfect. And in the past 2 years, several of my non-tech friends are using it without any problems whatsoever.
say what you want, as loud as you want it (within reason) wherever you want*, for as long as you want. Everyone else in the world is too busy living their lives to care.
*it's considered quite polite by those you sit next to when you tell the caller, 'I'm in a movie, I can't talk now." if your phone rings in the theatre.
If you ever read Wealth of Nations by that Marxist radical Adam Smith, you'd find that one of the basic tenets of capitalism is that in order for the market to find equilibrium, just as capital should be free to move to the most profitable area (which it is doing right now), labour should be, too.
Who supposedly support the free and lubricated market when it comes to the free movement of capital across the globe can be so protectionist when it comes to labour. By the tenets of capitalism, a Bangladeshi man should be able to move to New Jersey without let or hindrance and put X plumbers and handymen out of business. How come the proponents of capitalism can consider with glee another country's protected industries and financial markets falling to the inexorable march while at the same time, oddly, not sharing the glee of, say, a Sri Lankan chicken farmer at the thought of selling Americans chicken for 0.50$ / lb, retail?
Well, there's no right to privacy explicitly defined but the 4th amendment and court decisions have, read together, promoted the right of individual citizens to keep their data private from the state. secondly, there exist robust laws limiting data access and retention, which dont exist in india at all. I erred in saying explicitly that the right to privacy was guaranteed under the us constitution, but my meaning, that it is strongly upheld in the US still stands.
Bhagwad, you're wrong. I am in fact a lawyer and while Kharak Singh did mention the right to privacy in 1963, that right has scarcely been upheld or even enforced subsequently. Particularly in this day and age where, for example, ALL people renting houses in metros and ALL domestic servants in metros have to register themselves, their lease deeds and particulars with the state, the right to privacy as it is understood in the US is nonexistent here. Your links to your own blog notwithstanding.
One point to note here is that unlike the US, democracy works in India in the sense that there is a true multi-party system and a plethora of actual contenders from power, from the far left (Communist Party of India - Marxist) to the far right (Shiv Sena) (Army of Shiva) and the people have demonstrated that they are perfectly willing to consign parties to oblivion permanently if they don't serve public interests.
Makes sense to point out here 2 crucial differences between the US and India. In India, there's no Right to Privacy as strongly guaranteed under the US Constitution. Secondly, there is a strongly articulated bundle of rights called the "Right to Life". This includes the right to food, education, access to free / subsidised health services etc. In India, there are massive government programmes for the provision of basic services (food, shelter, education, irrigation, water, electricity, transport etc) to citizens.
In this context, the people, rather than being wary of the state and treating it like an enemy as is the case in the US actually want the state to help them. If you were to provide an Indian farmer with irrigation, access to primary healthcare facilities, water, sanitation, education and drought/flood relief, most would gladly fork over their private details.
Of course, modern states are brutal and the information collected will no doubt be used to casually repress people and tighten the state's hold on them. However, the integrity of your DNA fingerprint is of little consequence if you've committed suicide because of mounting debts.
coming from an Indian context, it's considered not rude in the least to answer your cellphone when you're in a restaurant even with friends or family. No restaurants here have rules against cellphones... it's just considered quite ordinary that someone may want to talk to someone else who's not there in the restaurant. In movie theatres, if you speak on your cellphone for a long time you'll get shushed but messaging is considered quite acceptable. I think it's a function of the fact that people live very social lives here and that by western standards, any part of even small towns would contain crowds of people.
There's very little privacy/solitude, relatively speaking, so an intrusion of a cellphone in the normal hubbub of daily life is not a significant addition.
I went to a "very good (Catholic) school" in my country (India) and the school system here was the other extreme. Nothing like mass punishment (the caning of 250 boys at a time) to build character (and camaraderie). Seriously, our system is fucked up, but yours... well, I feel a mixture of contempt, laughter and sympathy for you guys.
Kids answering back to teachers? Kids hitting teacher? Kids cheating in tests without knowing that they would probably be expelled and no other school would take you in? Teachers not even allowed to scold kids??
Yeah we have some strict ideas on education but at least over here, the kids are desperate to learn.
I'm an Indian, long-time/. vet and a lawyer by training.
India's Constitution has a different method of doing things from the American one; it chooses to emphasise or list Constitutional Rights and there is a "holy trinity" of Fundamental Rights which cannot ever be amended.
The Constitution is a living document, having been amended 94 times in 59 years, and the coders seem to have settled on a stable codebase in the last few years, with only minor version changes.
This may shock Americans but there is no constitutionally explicit Right to Privacy from the Government. I would propose that there's a far greater reliance on and therefore, necessary trust of the Government, in India, as compared to America. With starvation deaths occurring in India even in this day and age, the proposition seems to be something like "Who cares if you have all my personal details and if you're corrupt? Just give me my one subsistence meal a day and it's all okay."
Five years ago, the government launched a scheme to give rural Indians employment for a fixed number of days a year. This was decried as wasteful, leaky, wrong-headed etc but in some places, it has had some impact.
The problem is that the sub-contractors who the government uses for public works such as roads, bridges etc. often manipulate the muster rolls to skim off a portion of the money that would otherwise go to very poor people.
In this context, identity theft and the in-principle prickliness of "gosh darnit! i don't want teh guvmint to kno my pay-per-view habits!!!" is laughably trivial, when compared to the fact that people -- entire families, in some cases -- are dying of starvation.
I'd say that if this scheme saves the lives of even a thousand of India's poor, it's worth it, invasions of privacy, identity theft and all.
Note #1 To contextualise, we have over a billion people and the number of poor Indians (those earning less than the global average of US$1.25 a day) is 150% of the population of the entire United States.
Note #2 The Indian government considers a person below the poverty line if s/he earns less than US$0.25 a day. There are about 280 million Indians that are that poor, give or take a few tens of millions.
Bah. Only 6 hours on my AMD 64+ 3000, building with all debug symbols. Does take a huge amount of disk space to build, if you're going the -ggdb way, as I do with my packages. I don't know what the big deal is. Set it to build just before you go to bed. Wake up, it's done.
Service Temporarily Unavailable The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later. Apache/1.3.33 Server at www.abeautifulwww.com Port 80
a) The ministry in question has never ever (to my knowledge) developed anything that can even remotely be called technological hardware. b) The CPU, the RAM and many of the other components will have to be imported because India doesn't have a single factory that makes them. c) Is it even remotely possible to buy in bulk a laptop-grade battery for $10 ? My low-end cellphone battery costs (retail) more. d) What will the machine boot from ? a hard drive ? Flash? SSD? e) IF a laptop is being designed for India, it will have to support Indic languages. And as someone who works in Indic computing, the best input methods/rendering backends involve QT, GTK or MS. (Despite working on the wretched problem for years and years and spending crores of the taxpayer's money, there's still no reliable input method for entering Devanagari text on the 80x25 console.) MS is out because there's no way you can build an x86 based or WinCE based machine for $10. Maybe some ARM+Linux based machines could run QT/GTK. But, again, $10 seems awfully low.
I dont know where you are getting your 500 minimum from (a govt. owned bank I guess..) Of course. The vast majority of banks in India are state-run (both in terms of number of banks, number of branches, deposits, areas of operation)
And as far as private banks in India are concerned, they're unethical and badly run, with a veneer of marketing gloss on them. I've banked with HSBC, Federal, Syndicate, UCO and State Bank of India and while their staff are the most grouchy, State Bank is the most professional.
Citigroup has a target of 50,000 slum-dwelling customers. That means the total deposits might be $100 * 50,000 = $5million $100 per deposit ? You have to be kidding me. $100 works out to 4,467 Indian Rupees. Few can afford to keep that kind of money in a bank. For comparison, the minimum deposit in most savings bank accounts in India is 500 Rupees. And this is quite apart from the fact that Citibank in India is staffed by morons fresh out of college - not bankers.
Rebut someone's claim that there's no caste abuse in India and the saffron nutjobs come crawling out of the woodwork. The Indian Express leftwing? Pardon me while I split my gut laughing.
You know what? India's a socialist country. Says so right in the preamble. And no, you can't amend it, cause it's part of India's "basic structure", no not even if the Sangh gets a 2/3 majority in Parliament.
Oh, and the Supreme Court was one body which passed strictures against Bal Thackeray and Modi's Gujarat.
We need to get rid of every pinko liberal socialist in the country and only then will we start to REALLY progress.
Right.
I'm proud to call myself left-leaning. And to call those who you extol bigoted fascists and religious fundamentalists. Take your Semitic Hinduism and stuff it, say I.
Let's see you win another general election, brother sanghi. Why doesn't the RSS come off of it's pedestal and fight general elections, along with it's decrepit facade, the BJP?
Wakeup call. The Left had it's best ever tally in this General Elections. And unless there's more and more equality in this not-so-shining India, my bet is on it bettering it's tally.
The supposed advantages that the upper caste enjoyed are long gone.
Really? What about the fact that according to one winner of the Sean McBride International Peace Prize, "Most upper-caste people enjoy great advantages primarily as a birthright.
Sociologists have argued that a person born in a highly educated upper-caste family will have a totally different universe of knowledge, social contacts and elite acceptability, and wholly different access to information about the availability of courses, colleges and private tuition, career options and professional advice."
Additionally, the private sector (non-government, privately owned industries) has always been a meritocracy. If you apply for a job, you aren't even asked your caste or religion. So a question of casteism does not arise.
Oooh, what a statement! Let's take one sector, the media:
One report says "In the first-ever statistical analysis of its kind, a survey of the social profile of more than 300 senior journalists in 37 Hindi and English newspapers and television channels in the capital has found that "Hindu upper caste men" -- who form eight per cent of the country's population -- hold 71 per cent of the top jobs in the national media"
Mmm. And what about representation? Take a look at this.
As a non-Christian, one of the compelling aspects of Christianity is it's emphasis on justice for the poor, even redistributive justice.
For example,
The community of believers were of one heart and one mind. None of them ever claimed anything as his own; rather, everything was held in common. With power the apostles bore witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great respect was paid to them all; nor was there anyone needy among them, for all who owned property or houses sold them and lay them at the feet of the apostles to be distributed to everyone according to his need. (Acts 4:32-35; see also 2:42-47
So it's a fallacy that Christianity is incompatible with the Left. Rich man, camel, needle's eye, heaven, anyone?
Slashdot Mirror
I feel sad for people not on my server. Emerald Dream is an RP-PVP server (RolePlay+PVP) and world PVP is tremendous here. Our server is busy and balanced and there are several guilds, from behemoth PVP-only ones to colossal RP+PVP ones, to RP-friendly ones to small boutique dwarf-only or troll-only ones. The RP informs and invigorates our PVP and I and dozens of friends of mine would not be playing if it weren't for this server.
... my opinion is that this development is just to score political points, or, more accurately, to pre-empt your (right wing) political opponents from scoring political points. Technically, it's illegal to watch, read, store, sell, purchase, write or distribute porn, just as its illegal to urinate in the open in urban areas. But reality has little to do with the availability of porn or the practical freedom of all Indians to piss and shit wherever they feel like. Indian censorship of Internet porn sites such as this one has little to do with a government of a billion+ people feeling they have to protect the population from the reality of sex. It has a lot to do with not allowing the right wing to score easy political points and with the fact that there's no organised and public body of people calling for citizens' right to read and watch porn. Also, before you jump at it, no, reading porn is not protected under free speech laws in India.
At any rate, all I need to do is buy a cheap $4.75/mo VPS package and run a socks 5 proxy on it. Or be lazy and buy a $9 vpn service to get around it, if I could GAF. literotica.com isn't moving.
... and she likes it. She's 83 years old. And everything works just fine. Just freakin fine. Wireless, sound, DVD burner. I've been evangelising Linux since 1997 and by god, Ubuntu is getting a lot of shit absolutely freaking perfect. And in the past 2 years, several of my non-tech friends are using it without any problems whatsoever.
say what you want, as loud as you want it (within reason) wherever you want*, for as long as you want. Everyone else in the world is too busy living their lives to care.
*it's considered quite polite by those you sit next to when you tell the caller, 'I'm in a movie, I can't talk now." if your phone rings in the theatre.
If you ever read Wealth of Nations by that Marxist radical Adam Smith, you'd find that one of the basic tenets of capitalism is that in order for the market to find equilibrium, just as capital should be free to move to the most profitable area (which it is doing right now), labour should be, too.
Who supposedly support the free and lubricated market when it comes to the free movement of capital across the globe can be so protectionist when it comes to labour. By the tenets of capitalism, a Bangladeshi man should be able to move to New Jersey without let or hindrance and put X plumbers and handymen out of business. How come the proponents of capitalism can consider with glee another country's protected industries and financial markets falling to the inexorable march while at the same time, oddly, not sharing the glee of, say, a Sri Lankan chicken farmer at the thought of selling Americans chicken for 0.50$ / lb, retail?
Capitalist? Ha
Well, there's no right to privacy explicitly defined but the 4th amendment and court decisions have, read together, promoted the right of individual citizens to keep their data private from the state. secondly, there exist robust laws limiting data access and retention, which dont exist in india at all. I erred in saying explicitly that the right to privacy was guaranteed under the us constitution, but my meaning, that it is strongly upheld in the US still stands.
Bhagwad, you're wrong. I am in fact a lawyer and while Kharak Singh did mention the right to privacy in 1963, that right has scarcely been upheld or even enforced subsequently. Particularly in this day and age where, for example, ALL people renting houses in metros and ALL domestic servants in metros have to register themselves, their lease deeds and particulars with the state, the right to privacy as it is understood in the US is nonexistent here. Your links to your own blog notwithstanding.
One point to note here is that unlike the US, democracy works in India in the sense that there is a true multi-party system and a plethora of actual contenders from power, from the far left (Communist Party of India - Marxist) to the far right (Shiv Sena) (Army of Shiva) and the people have demonstrated that they are perfectly willing to consign parties to oblivion permanently if they don't serve public interests.
Makes sense to point out here 2 crucial differences between the US and India.
In India, there's no Right to Privacy as strongly guaranteed under the US Constitution. Secondly, there is a strongly articulated bundle of rights called the "Right to Life". This includes the right to food, education, access to free / subsidised health services etc. In India, there are massive government programmes for the provision of basic services (food, shelter, education, irrigation, water, electricity, transport etc) to citizens.
In this context, the people, rather than being wary of the state and treating it like an enemy as is the case in the US actually want the state to help them. If you were to provide an Indian farmer with irrigation, access to primary healthcare facilities, water, sanitation, education and drought/flood relief, most would gladly fork over their private details.
Of course, modern states are brutal and the information collected will no doubt be used to casually repress people and tighten the state's hold on them. However, the integrity of your DNA fingerprint is of little consequence if you've committed suicide because of mounting debts.
coming from an Indian context, it's considered not rude in the least to answer your cellphone when you're in a restaurant even with friends or family. No restaurants here have rules against cellphones... it's just considered quite ordinary that someone may want to talk to someone else who's not there in the restaurant. In movie theatres, if you speak on your cellphone for a long time you'll get shushed but messaging is considered quite acceptable. I think it's a function of the fact that people live very social lives here and that by western standards, any part of even small towns would contain crowds of people.
There's very little privacy/solitude, relatively speaking, so an intrusion of a cellphone in the normal hubbub of daily life is not a significant addition.
Ahh Americans.
I went to a "very good (Catholic) school" in my country (India) and the school system here was the other extreme. Nothing like mass punishment (the caning of 250 boys at a time) to build character (and camaraderie). Seriously, our system is fucked up, but yours ... well, I feel a mixture of contempt, laughter and sympathy for you guys.
Kids answering back to teachers? Kids hitting teacher? Kids cheating in tests without knowing that they would probably be expelled and no other school would take you in? Teachers not even allowed to scold kids??
Yeah we have some strict ideas on education but at least over here, the kids are desperate to learn.
maan talk about misplaced priorities.
I'm an Indian, long-time /. vet and a lawyer by training.
India's Constitution has a different method of doing things from the American one; it chooses to emphasise or list Constitutional Rights and there is a "holy trinity" of Fundamental Rights which cannot ever be amended.
The Constitution is a living document, having been amended 94 times in 59 years, and the coders seem to have settled on a stable codebase in the last few years, with only minor version changes.
This may shock Americans but there is no constitutionally explicit Right to Privacy from the Government. I would propose that there's a far greater reliance on and therefore, necessary trust of the Government, in India, as compared to America. With starvation deaths occurring in India even in this day and age, the proposition seems to be something like "Who cares if you have all my personal details and if you're corrupt? Just give me my one subsistence meal a day and it's all okay."
Five years ago, the government launched a scheme to give rural Indians employment for a fixed number of days a year. This was decried as wasteful, leaky, wrong-headed etc but in some places, it has had some impact.
The problem is that the sub-contractors who the government uses for public works such as roads, bridges etc. often manipulate the muster rolls to skim off a portion of the money that would otherwise go to very poor people.
In this context, identity theft and the in-principle prickliness of "gosh darnit! i don't want teh guvmint to kno my pay-per-view habits!!!" is laughably trivial, when compared to the fact that people -- entire families, in some cases -- are dying of starvation.
I'd say that if this scheme saves the lives of even a thousand of India's poor, it's worth it, invasions of privacy, identity theft and all.
Note #1 To contextualise, we have over a billion people and the number of poor Indians (those earning less than the global average of US$1.25 a day) is 150% of the population of the entire United States.
Note #2 The Indian government considers a person below the poverty line if s/he earns less than US$0.25 a day. There are about 280 million Indians that are that poor, give or take a few tens of millions.
So, yeah... identity theft? privacy? meh.
Bah. Only 6 hours on my AMD 64+ 3000, building with all debug symbols. Does take a huge amount of disk space to build, if you're going the -ggdb way, as I do with my packages. I don't know what the big deal is. Set it to build just before you go to bed. Wake up, it's done.
/windowslivewritervisualizingthepowerstruggleinwiService Temporarily Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
Apache/1.3.33 Server at www.abeautifulwww.com Port 80
This *has* to be purposeful. The letters are quite far away. Or he's using Voice to Text software.
I have to say
a) The ministry in question has never ever (to my knowledge) developed anything that can even remotely be called technological hardware.
b) The CPU, the RAM and many of the other components will have to be imported because India doesn't have a single factory that makes them.
c) Is it even remotely possible to buy in bulk a laptop-grade battery for $10 ? My low-end cellphone battery costs (retail) more.
d) What will the machine boot from ? a hard drive ? Flash? SSD?
e) IF a laptop is being designed for India, it will have to support Indic languages. And as someone who works in Indic computing, the best input methods/rendering backends involve QT, GTK or MS. (Despite working on the wretched problem for years and years and spending crores of the taxpayer's money, there's still no reliable input method for entering Devanagari text on the 80x25 console.) MS is out because there's no way you can build an x86 based or WinCE based machine for $10. Maybe some ARM+Linux based machines could run QT/GTK. But, again, $10 seems awfully low.
*sigh*
Aniruddha Shankar
For those running Linux, pf also runs on Gentoo :)
Nonsense! The keys you speak of are all on the right hand side of the keyboard. When I'm watching porn, my right hand is otherwise engaged.
And yes, I know, you can remap the keys - but on mplayer you have to edit a text file whereas it's clickety on VLC.
rootkit v. counter rootkit
counter counter rootkit v. counter rootkit
counter counter counter rootkit v. counter counter rootkit
An endless cycle of patch, pray, patch, pray, reinstall awaits us.
X|K|Ubuntu, anyone?
You know what? India's a socialist country. Says so right in the preamble. And no, you can't amend it, cause it's part of India's "basic structure", no not even if the Sangh gets a 2/3 majority in Parliament.
Oh, and the Supreme Court was one body which passed strictures against Bal Thackeray and Modi's Gujarat.
Right.
I'm proud to call myself left-leaning. And to call those who you extol bigoted fascists and religious fundamentalists. Take your Semitic Hinduism and stuff it, say I.
Let's see you win another general election, brother sanghi. Why doesn't the RSS come off of it's pedestal and fight general elections, along with it's decrepit facade, the BJP?
Wakeup call. The Left had it's best ever tally in this General Elections. And unless there's more and more equality in this not-so-shining India, my bet is on it bettering it's tally.
See you at the revolution, brother.
Sociologists have argued that a person born in a highly educated upper-caste family will have a totally different universe of knowledge, social contacts and elite acceptability, and wholly different access to information about the availability of courses, colleges and private tuition, career options and professional advice."
Oooh, what a statement! Let's take one sector, the media: One report says "In the first-ever statistical analysis of its kind, a survey of the social profile of more than 300 senior journalists in 37 Hindi and English newspapers and television channels in the capital has found that "Hindu upper caste men" -- who form eight per cent of the country's population -- hold 71 per cent of the top jobs in the national media"Mmm. And what about representation? Take a look at this.
I have to agree, brother.For example,
The community of believers were of one heart and one mind. None of them ever claimed anything as his own; rather, everything was held in common. With power the apostles bore witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great respect was paid to them all; nor was there anyone needy among them, for all who owned property or houses sold them and lay them at the feet of the apostles to be distributed to everyone according to his need. (Acts 4:32-35; see also 2:42-47 So it's a fallacy that Christianity is incompatible with the Left. Rich man, camel, needle's eye, heaven, anyone?