I for one am not doing this because hill-tribe Laotians are not, as you suggest "a large group of people that need it the most." Too often, these technology projects don't think about the social implications of introducing, no, forcing computers into communities where the most advanced technology in use is an hydraulic rice-thresher. How are computers and KDE going to help them with their swidden agriculture, or the growing problem of opium addiction? What about prostitution, or the road infrastructure?
Yes, self-advocacy is a Good Thing(tm), but how useful is communicating with the outside world if the outside world doesn't speak your language? The highland groups that are being involved with this project don't even speak Lao, let alone Thai or English! When dam construction starts in one of their villages, they might start talking, but no-one will be able to listen.
So much good could be done with technology, but it really seems like the people out there implementing it don't think much further than the gadget factor, and certainly don't think of the real implications for the people on whom they're imposing these technologies.
I can't believe that people that are so intelligent in many other respects are so absolutely stupid when it comes to this "war".
Has anyone actually considered the following? From scanning through the comments, it appears not.
First of all, in response to the story, does it MATTER if the Afghanis are difficult to attack? Why the hell are they being attacked in the first place?
Before you go on a CNN-induced rant about terrorism, consider the following statement, fundamental to "The American Way": "All suspects are INNOCENT until PROVEN GUILTY by a JURY of their PEERS". Somehow, bombing (or otherwise killing) [hundreds of] thousands of civilians doesn't match up to that.
Or will vengance be reached by killing so many non-american civilians? If that's the case, just look to Iraq (hundreds of thousands of civilians dead by American ammunition), Vietnam (hundreds of thousands), Laos (hundreds of thousands), and so many more I'd prefer not to mention... Enough innocent civilians are already dead. Stop fighting, for Christ, God, Allah, Linus' sake!
If you don't, I'll just have to hunt you down and kill you (and your family, your school, and anyone you've ever met, by example of the Unrestrained Slaughterers of America)
There are three (3) albums which feature common elements from "They Might Be Giants," "Lincoln," and the "two" B-Sides/Dial-a-Song collections. These albums are:
"They Might Be Giants" "Lincoln" "Then: The Early Years" . This one includes as the second half of the first disc the first B-Sides collection. On the second half of the second disc is the second B-Sides collection.
If GoodNoise is splitting the B-Sides up then, yes, they are changing "which track goes where."
They're charging 99 cents per track -- but TMBG has a long history of releasing much smaller tracks (like 2 seconds - 1 minute) as just "interjections"... If they start charging for each track of "Fingertips" from Apollo 18, the MP3LP will cost MUCH more than the CD.
There's a program for windows called Xfileget. It pretends to be realaudio, and downloads the streams (without loss) to a local file. My guess is that it would be easier to convert once you had the file local? Does anything like xfileget exist for linux (without doing raw tcpdumps?:) )
The linux world seems to be a hash of various things, anyways, and i don't think that redhat necessarily has much power. If one looks at the distribution lists, there are a lot of redhat derived distributions. As previous comments have mentioned, if any distribution attempts a hostile takeover, people will just move away. This is something to be worried about in 5 years. It's too early now.
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I for one am not doing this because hill-tribe Laotians are not, as you suggest "a large group of people that need it the most." Too often, these technology projects don't think about the social implications of introducing, no, forcing computers into communities where the most advanced technology in use is an hydraulic rice-thresher. How are computers and KDE going to help them with their swidden agriculture, or the growing problem of opium addiction? What about prostitution, or the road infrastructure?
Yes, self-advocacy is a Good Thing(tm), but how useful is communicating with the outside world if the outside world doesn't speak your language? The highland groups that are being involved with this project don't even speak Lao, let alone Thai or English! When dam construction starts in one of their villages, they might start talking, but no-one will be able to listen.
So much good could be done with technology, but it really seems like the people out there implementing it don't think much further than the gadget factor, and certainly don't think of the real implications for the people on whom they're imposing these technologies.
I can't believe that people that are so intelligent in many other respects are so absolutely stupid when it comes to this "war".
Has anyone actually considered the following? From scanning through the comments, it appears not.
First of all, in response to the story, does it MATTER if the Afghanis are difficult to attack? Why the hell are they being attacked in the first place?
Before you go on a CNN-induced rant about terrorism, consider the following statement, fundamental to "The American Way": "All suspects are INNOCENT until PROVEN GUILTY by a JURY of their PEERS". Somehow, bombing (or otherwise killing) [hundreds of] thousands of civilians doesn't match up to that.
Or will vengance be reached by killing so many non-american civilians? If that's the case, just look to Iraq (hundreds of thousands of civilians dead by American ammunition), Vietnam (hundreds of thousands), Laos (hundreds of thousands), and so many more I'd prefer not to mention... Enough innocent civilians are already dead. Stop fighting, for Christ, God, Allah, Linus' sake!
If you don't, I'll just have to hunt you down and kill you (and your family, your school, and anyone you've ever met, by example of the Unrestrained Slaughterers of America)
There are three (3) albums which feature common elements from "They Might Be Giants," "Lincoln," and the "two" B-Sides/Dial-a-Song collections. These albums are:
... If they start charging for each track of "Fingertips" from Apollo 18, the MP3LP will cost MUCH more than the CD.
"They Might Be Giants"
"Lincoln"
"Then: The Early Years" . This one includes as the second half of the first disc the first B-Sides collection. On the second half of the second disc is the second B-Sides collection.
If GoodNoise is splitting the B-Sides up then, yes, they are changing "which track goes where."
They're charging 99 cents per track -- but TMBG has a long history of releasing much smaller tracks (like 2 seconds - 1 minute) as just "interjections"
There's a program for windows called Xfileget. It pretends to be realaudio, and downloads the streams (without loss) to a local file. My guess is that it would be easier to convert once you had the file local? Does anything like xfileget exist for linux (without doing raw tcpdumps? :) )
The linux world seems to be a hash of various things, anyways, and i don't think that redhat necessarily has much power. If one looks at the distribution lists, there are a lot of redhat derived distributions. As previous comments have mentioned, if any distribution attempts a hostile takeover, people will just move away. This is something to be worried about in 5 years. It's too early now.