I'm an Indian IT consultant, very happy with my job at a non-profit in New Delhi. I'm bemused by the attitudes that seem to pervade this discussion. Is not the search for cheaper labour a part of capitalism ? Is not greed (as the parent poster states) a pillar of the capitalist economy ? Can't you guys use the (market)Force?
Oh, and imagine what it would be like if instead of IT workers, farmers and doctors and teachers and plumbers and electricians could all get replaced by people who would be glad to work at the minimum American wage, or live in absolute penury so they can keep sending their wages home. Seriously. If you send $200 back to India every month, that money alone can support a family of four in a metropolis.
American milleniarist "capitalism" makes me sick.
Oh, and first you bitch and moan about the horror of training your own replacement (and it is horrible, I don't deny). Your bigotry, racism and prejudice are all out on full display. You cavil at the low quality and inappropriateness of your replacement. And then you plot (as several posts in this discussion have done) to sabotage them. See any hypocrisy here ?
Capitalism is great until YOU get fucked.
Re:Nanotech bounding forth with no safety concerns
on
Nanotech Gone Awry?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Many here will remember Crichton's "Prey", a book that details a nanotech swarm gone mad, and "infesting" a woman to such a degree that her husband, the protagonist, does not realise at first.
A critique of this fearmongering...
"...gray goo would be very difficult to design. It would be far more complex than a car--probably more complex than the Space Shuttle. General Motors recently made headlines by taking only a few months to design a car. It's completely implausible that a failing company could create an evolving gray goo by re-engineering a specialized product in a matter of weeks; this same company couldn't even solve the relatively simple problem of keeping the swarm together in a breeze. Remember that the swarm-bots don't directly replicate; they are built by assemblers using bacterial chemicals. Among other tasks, the scientists would have had to rapidly invent a way to transfer the evolved program out of the successful swarm-bots and feed it back into the assemblers or the bacteria to produce the next generation. This would require a completely new set of molecular machinery."
The article refers in addition to another interesting snippet:
Among the other data in Symantec's report are new "time to compromise" figures that try to gauge how long an unpatched, unprotected computer would last before it has snatched by a hacker.
Windows XP Professional, said Symantec, stays safe just one hour and 12 seconds, while the
Windows 2000 Server (with SP4) made it an hour and 17 minutes. An unpatched Windows Server 2003 system lasted somewhat longer.
In contrast, unpatched
Linux installations of both Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and SuSE Linux 9 Desktop were never compromised during their month-and-a-half exposure to attackers.
No one I know uses emerge's search function. In all the Gentoo machines that I administer, I use eix to search the package tree. eix ( http://dev.croup.de/proj/eix/ ) is MUCH faster than esearch - searches typically take 1 second or so. Building the entire index from scratch - 10,300 packages in 144 categories, not including multiple versions and stable/unstable masks takes just this long:
bhim ~ # time update-eix Reading Portage settings.. Building database (/var/cache/eix) from scratch.. [0]/usr/portage/ (cache: flat)
Reading 100% [1]/usr/local/portage (cache: none)
Reading 100% Applying masks.. Database contains 10300 packages in 144 categories.
real 0m54.698s user 0m2.356s sys 0m1.755s
eix plugs into emerge so I don't emerge sync anymore - I eix-sync - apart from syncing the tree, it shows me a really neat listing of what new package versions and packages are available.
Except of course now you're expecting there to be wifi spots at the same places there are riots and civil disturbances.
Let me clarify. A civil society organisation or an NGO or a news gathering organisation could easily put in place combos of wifi hubs with cheap UPS battery backup during conflict situations since the worst violence is often orchestrated and happens a few days after the initial flareup. That would allow it's reporters / photographers / videographers to capture events and constantly keep on uploading them to base camp, from where they could be dumped/mirrored onto the 'net.
And if there were, no doubt you'd have to stand quite still while your pics were uploaded which wouldn't necessarily be convenient at the time.
I'm not sure I understand. I've managed get WiFi net access from a laptop while riding in a cycle-rickshaw. I would assume that the camera, since it's WiFi didn't expect me to remain stock still while the images were uploading.
If that weren't unlikely enough a totalitarian state is likely to have little internet access or extremely restricted access.
The point is not to get the cameras to upload to the Internet - but to upload to someone's laptop back in base camp. from there, an org could burn VCDs, use various (stega/ssh/proxies/tor/freenet) methods to put the material onto the net.
On top of that is Kodak itself. Their site probably pitches itself as "family friendly" so you can bet that any civil disobediance pics would be wiped off their site without a second's thought.
Well, the article talks about how the camera can be used to view pics from Kodak's site..and that it can email (or otherwise transfer) the pics FROM the camera. There're a number of places that are more hospitable to civil disobedience pics than familyroom.kodak.com
I wouldn't diss the idea completely - after all if your camera would connect to an ad-hoc network you could perhaps arrange for someone with a PDA or small laptop to shadow you at some distance and broadcast the pics back to them, but it would still be an awkward arrangement.
Why ? that would be perfect. The camera would only need batteries. F'rex, a minority area is being threatened by a majority area. Place cameras on rooftops/overlooking approach roads, have them constantly take pics and mail them. Even if the cams were found and destroyed in the subsequent violence, they'd have done their jobs.
Perhaps it's simpler and equally effective to use redundancy - multiple photographers, with each passing their filled memory cards to runners.
That's the point. You can block/kill the runners and smash the cameras. Once you do that, no more coverage. Imagine if you could film a policeman trying to smash your camera up, and have the satisfaction of knowing that while he may be able to smash your camera, the images of that act will live on...
Coming from a country where major riots and civil disturbances have flared up several times in a decade, and where the electoral process in certain areas is inflected with violence, this may be a very positive development.
Visual documentation of violence, including street violence, is something that is very powerful in these circumstances. A network of WiFi cameras that connects to a battery-powered wireless switch(es) could turn this into an extremely powerful journalistic tool.
Journalists, especially some very courageous ones, have had their (expensive) equipment seized and smashed - even by the police. In effect, the very act of powerfull and provocative reportage causes the reportage to be fuitless. A couple of cheap wireless cameras clipped onto someone's lapel or mounted in places where there is a clear field of view could provide (highly incriminating?) video data even upto the moment the cameras were destroyed.
And think of the possibilities for exposing corruption. If you were to go to, say, a police station where you knew a bribe would be demanded of you, with the intent of secretly filming the proceedings, you'd be banking on the camera remaining undetected and being able to take the recording away with you. With a WiFi camera broadcasting to an Internet-connected laptop(s) across the street, things change quickly:)
There's tons of fun and functionality in blizzard's games that don't involve logging onto bnet. I should know, I've played every Blizzard game (except for WoW) here in India and never once logged onto bnet - for the simple reason that the ping times are literally from the other side of the planet. Blizzard's games are excellent and once I could afford them, i started buying them, ridiculously expensive though they are, relative to my (above average) salary for the simple reason that Blizzard makes, IMO, the best computer games.
Forcing me to connect to the 'net to play my Blu-Ray disc on my Blu-Ray player is just... stupid.
I'll never buy a Blu-Ray disc or a Blu-Ray player.
By saying that fair use gives him the right to CC-non-commercial-license stuff for commercial work. But that would only be correct if he used it WITHIN the parameters of the fair use doctrine. If, on the other hand, it were public domain, he could use the entirety for commercial purposes.
So CC-NC does have some use then.
Oh, and what about share-alike? Maybe someone doesn't mind people making money out of something s/he creates but would hate the thought of someone else down the line being prevented from mixing/sampling/whatever that creation. What does conventional intellectual "property" have for them?
Cybercafes are becoming something of a cottage industry here in India and the vast, vast majority run on cheap, assembled white boxes running pirated versions of Windows 98. I've heard that that's the scenario on most other developing nations.
VERY IMPORTANT FACTOR: THEY ALL HAVE CDROM DRIVES! - (Since they need to be reformatted frequently, and the most easily trainable way to install Windows is to use the install CD)
Carry a KNOPPIX CDROM with you that you boot from - instant freedom from Windows based keyloggers. Run KDE with the Redmond9x theme and a browser with an IE theme so that to the casual observer you are running Windows.
You can also use FlashLinux to boot the computer from a USB key (quite cheap these days). Remember to store sensitive data on it using an encrypted loopback device (Should be supported by FlashLinux).
Use the excellent list of anonymising proxies and ssh tunnelers given above... they'll really help.
Contact me if you need help... I like interfacing between human beings and technologists:)
Well, time to throw in a plug for Gentoo:) - if you use it, you'll either use the genkernel tool which compiles the kernel for you after automagically deciding what you want - or you'll do it the better way - by learning through experience how to do it. I can't remember the last time I used a machine that had a kernel I didn't compile.
The right to health has been read into the right to life.
The Fundamental Right to Life, as stated in Article 21 of the Indian Constitution, guarantees to the individual her/his life and personal liberty which cannot be taken away except by a procedure established by law.
The Supreme Court has widely interpreted this fundamental right and has included in Article 21 the right to live with dignity and "all the necessities of life such as adequate nutrition, clothing...."
In Consumer Education and Research Centre and others Vs. Union of India (AIR 1995 SC 922). This was affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1997, which said, in State of Punjab and Others v. Mohinder Singh (AIR 1997 SC 1225) that "It is now a settled law that right to health is integral to right to life. Government has a constitutional obligation to provide health facilities."
The current dispensation in India has come to power with the support of leftist parties, who, along with commentators, non-governmental organisations and members of civil society organisations oppose the promulgation of this ordinance or the enactment of the Patents Amendment Act for a major reason.
Medicines.
With the establishment of this ordinance, which will expire after a time and have to be reintroduced as a bill in Parliament, medicines in India, including lifesaving ones, will cost up to four times to a hundred times more than they do now.
The current government is forced to enact this law under it's obligations under the WTO's TRIPS. However, the draft Bill not only fails to use the flexibility available within the TRIPS Agreement but also goes beyond TRIPS. In other words, the draft Bill proposes patent protection more than what is required under TRIPS.
Civil society organisations believe that draft Bill provisions would give monopoly rights to pharmaceutical companies at the cost of accessibility and availability of drugs under the product patent regime. It's worth noting here that the Right to Health is a Fundamental Right under the Indian Constitution.
What are the implications of a prison or a government censorship body using free software for a database ? Does anyone here apart from me think there are any dissonances ?
When one of my friends first got MOO, I was still stuck with an 8088/cga/640k/21mb machine - so, unlike other excellent games like F-19, which I could still run on my machine, I had to borrow (steal) 9 1.44 mb floppies, compress it using LHARC (remember that?) and commence a nomadic existence wandering from one friend's house to another - until they kicked me out, that is. I still know the names of the.lbx files by heart.
If anyone wants MOO, email me. If anyone wants MOO2, email me, and I'll tell you where you can get it;)
Slashdot Mirror
You mean you didn't know about that ? It was really news about 3 years ago when it was new.
I'm an Indian IT consultant, very happy with my job at a non-profit in New Delhi. I'm bemused by the attitudes that seem to pervade this discussion. Is not the search for cheaper labour a part of capitalism ? Is not greed (as the parent poster states) a pillar of the capitalist economy ? Can't you guys use the (market)Force?
Oh, and imagine what it would be like if instead of IT workers, farmers and doctors and teachers and plumbers and electricians could all get replaced by people who would be glad to work at the minimum American wage, or live in absolute penury so they can keep sending their wages home. Seriously. If you send $200 back to India every month, that money alone can support a family of four in a metropolis.
American milleniarist "capitalism" makes me sick.
Oh, and first you bitch and moan about the horror of training your own replacement (and it is horrible, I don't deny). Your bigotry, racism and prejudice are all out on full display. You cavil at the low quality and inappropriateness of your replacement. And then you plot (as several posts in this discussion have done) to sabotage them. See any hypocrisy here ?
Capitalism is great until YOU get fucked.
A critique of this fearmongering...
Full critique available hereAmong the other data in Symantec's report are new "time to compromise" figures that try to gauge how long an unpatched, unprotected computer would last before it has snatched by a hacker.
Windows XP Professional, said Symantec, stays safe just one hour and 12 seconds, while the Windows 2000 Server (with SP4) made it an hour and 17 minutes. An unpatched Windows Server 2003 system lasted somewhat longer.
In contrast, unpatched Linux installations of both Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and SuSE Linux 9 Desktop were never compromised during their month-and-a-half exposure to attackers.
No one I know uses emerge's search function. In all the Gentoo machines that I administer, I use eix to search the package tree. eix ( http://dev.croup.de/proj/eix/ ) is MUCH faster than esearch - searches typically take 1 second or so. Building the entire index from scratch - 10,300 packages in 144 categories, not including multiple versions and stable/unstable masks takes just this long:
.. .. /usr/portage/ (cache: flat) /usr/local/portage (cache: none) ..
:)
bhim ~ # time update-eix
Reading Portage settings
Building database (/var/cache/eix) from scratch
[0]
Reading 100%
[1]
Reading 100%
Applying masks
Database contains 10300 packages in 144 categories.
real 0m54.698s
user 0m2.356s
sys 0m1.755s
eix plugs into emerge so I don't emerge sync anymore - I eix-sync - apart from syncing the tree, it shows me a really neat listing of what new package versions and packages are available.
eix away
K
Let me clarify. A civil society organisation or an NGO or a news gathering organisation could easily put in place combos of wifi hubs with cheap UPS battery backup during conflict situations since the worst violence is often orchestrated and happens a few days after the initial flareup. That would allow it's reporters / photographers / videographers to capture events and constantly keep on uploading them to base camp, from where they could be dumped/mirrored onto the 'net.
And if there were, no doubt you'd have to stand quite still while your pics were uploaded which wouldn't necessarily be convenient at the time.
I'm not sure I understand. I've managed get WiFi net access from a laptop while riding in a cycle-rickshaw. I would assume that the camera, since it's WiFi didn't expect me to remain stock still while the images were uploading.
If that weren't unlikely enough a totalitarian state is likely to have little internet access or extremely restricted access.
The point is not to get the cameras to upload to the Internet - but to upload to someone's laptop back in base camp. from there, an org could burn VCDs, use various (stega/ssh/proxies/tor/freenet) methods to put the material onto the net.
On top of that is Kodak itself. Their site probably pitches itself as "family friendly" so you can bet that any civil disobediance pics would be wiped off their site without a second's thought.
Well, the article talks about how the camera can be used to view pics from Kodak's site..and that it can email (or otherwise transfer) the pics FROM the camera. There're a number of places that are more hospitable to civil disobedience pics than familyroom.kodak.com
I wouldn't diss the idea completely - after all if your camera would connect to an ad-hoc network you could perhaps arrange for someone with a PDA or small laptop to shadow you at some distance and broadcast the pics back to them, but it would still be an awkward arrangement.
Why ? that would be perfect. The camera would only need batteries. F'rex, a minority area is being threatened by a majority area. Place cameras on rooftops/overlooking approach roads, have them constantly take pics and mail them. Even if the cams were found and destroyed in the subsequent violence, they'd have done their jobs.
Perhaps it's simpler and equally effective to use redundancy - multiple photographers, with each passing their filled memory cards to runners.
That's the point. You can block/kill the runners and smash the cameras. Once you do that, no more coverage. Imagine if you could film a policeman trying to smash your camera up, and have the satisfaction of knowing that while he may be able to smash your camera, the images of that act will live on...
cheers,
Aniruddha "Karim" Shankar
Coming from a country where major riots and civil disturbances have flared up several times in a decade, and where the electoral process in certain areas is inflected with violence, this may be a very positive development.
:)
Visual documentation of violence, including street violence, is something that is very powerful in these circumstances. A network of WiFi cameras that connects to a battery-powered wireless switch(es) could turn this into an extremely powerful journalistic tool.
Journalists, especially some very courageous ones, have had their (expensive) equipment seized and smashed - even by the police. In effect, the very act of powerfull and provocative reportage causes the reportage to be fuitless. A couple of cheap wireless cameras clipped onto someone's lapel or mounted in places where there is a clear field of view could provide (highly incriminating?) video data even upto the moment the cameras were destroyed.
And think of the possibilities for exposing corruption. If you were to go to, say, a police station where you knew a bribe would be demanded of you, with the intent of secretly filming the proceedings, you'd be banking on the camera remaining undetected and being able to take the recording away with you. With a WiFi camera broadcasting to an Internet-connected laptop(s) across the street, things change quickly
Cheers,
Aniruddha "Karim" Shankar
"... automatically insert any disk I insert, nothing happens."
must be the vista beta.
bnetd supports the frozen throne??
There's tons of fun and functionality in blizzard's games that don't involve logging onto bnet. I should know, I've played every Blizzard game (except for WoW) here in India and never once logged onto bnet - for the simple reason that the ping times are literally from the other side of the planet. Blizzard's games are excellent and once I could afford them, i started buying them, ridiculously expensive though they are, relative to my (above average) salary for the simple reason that Blizzard makes, IMO, the best computer games.
... stupid.
Forcing me to connect to the 'net to play my Blu-Ray disc on my Blu-Ray player is just
I'll never buy a Blu-Ray disc or a Blu-Ray player.
K
Well, under the same reasoning, so should every other license under the sun, naming the possible fair uses...
By saying that fair use gives him the right to CC-non-commercial-license stuff for commercial work. But that would only be correct if he used it WITHIN the parameters of the fair use doctrine. If, on the other hand, it were public domain, he could use the entirety for commercial purposes.
So CC-NC does have some use then.
Oh, and what about share-alike? Maybe someone doesn't mind people making money out of something s/he creates but would hate the thought of someone else down the line being prevented from mixing/sampling/whatever that creation. What does conventional intellectual "property" have for them?
Cybercafes are becoming something of a cottage industry here in India and the vast, vast majority run on cheap, assembled white boxes running pirated versions of Windows 98. I've heard that that's the scenario on most other developing nations.
:)
VERY IMPORTANT FACTOR: THEY ALL HAVE CDROM DRIVES! - (Since they need to be reformatted frequently, and the most easily trainable way to install Windows is to use the install CD)
Carry a KNOPPIX CDROM with you that you boot from - instant freedom from Windows based keyloggers. Run KDE with the Redmond9x theme and a browser with an IE theme so that to the casual observer you are running Windows.
You can also use FlashLinux to boot the computer from a USB key (quite cheap these days). Remember to store sensitive data on it using an encrypted loopback device (Should be supported by FlashLinux).
Use the excellent list of anonymising proxies and ssh tunnelers given above... they'll really help.
Contact me if you need help... I like interfacing between human beings and technologists
Well, time to throw in a plug for Gentoo :) - if you use it, you'll either use the genkernel tool which compiles the kernel for you after automagically deciding what you want - or you'll do it the better way - by learning through experience how to do it. I can't remember the last time I used a machine that had a kernel I didn't compile.
The Fundamental Right to Life, as stated in Article 21 of the Indian Constitution, guarantees to the individual her/his life and personal liberty which cannot be taken away except by a procedure established by law.
The Supreme Court has widely interpreted this fundamental right and has included in Article 21 the right to live with dignity and "all the necessities of life such as adequate nutrition, clothing...." In Consumer Education and Research Centre and others Vs. Union of India (AIR 1995 SC 922). This was affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1997, which said, in State of Punjab and Others v. Mohinder Singh (AIR 1997 SC 1225) that "It is now a settled law that right to health is integral to right to life. Government has a constitutional obligation to provide health facilities."
Medicines.
With the establishment of this ordinance, which will expire after a time and have to be reintroduced as a bill in Parliament, medicines in India, including lifesaving ones, will cost up to four times to a hundred times more than they do now.
The current government is forced to enact this law under it's obligations under the WTO's TRIPS. However, the draft Bill not only fails to use the flexibility available within the TRIPS Agreement but also goes beyond TRIPS. In other words, the draft Bill proposes patent protection more than what is required under TRIPS.
Civil society organisations believe that draft Bill provisions would give monopoly rights to pharmaceutical companies at the cost of accessibility and availability of drugs under the product patent regime. It's worth noting here that the Right to Health is a Fundamental Right under the Indian Constitution.
Here's a link which details the situation. Here's a fact sheet on the issue of Generic Drugs as well as a document called the Myths and Realities of the Pharmaceutical Industry that the European Generic Medicines Association has prepared. The movement against the amendment in the law is being spearheaded by the Affordable Medicines and Treatment Campaign. Here's a letter to the Prime Minister of India that you can send if you wish to help out as well as one letter to the Chairperson of the National Human Rights Commission.
What bothers me is that when asked to bend before Intellectual Property Rights, we have begun to crawl. Aniruddha "Karim" Shankar
um. It's the Berne Convention http://www.wipo.int/clea/docs/en/wo/wo001en.htm/ not the Bourne Treaty.
What are the implications of a prison or a government censorship body using free software for a database ? Does anyone here apart from me think there are any dissonances ?
When one of my friends first got MOO, I was still stuck with an 8088/cga/640k/21mb machine - so, unlike other excellent games like F-19, which I could still run on my machine, I had to borrow (steal) 9 1.44 mb floppies, compress it using LHARC (remember that?) and commence a nomadic existence wandering from one friend's house to another - until they kicked me out, that is. I still know the names of the .lbx files by heart.
;)
If anyone wants MOO, email me. If anyone wants MOO2, email me, and I'll tell you where you can get it
Can't wait for MOO 3.