The actual cost would add on a case, a power supply, a mouse, a keyboard and an HDMI display, per $25 board - say 200USD minimum.
Since these boards are intended for schools, these extras would need to be purchased, as they can't just be "scrounged" from other equipment - which would then, itself become unusable. In addition there is cost associated with integrating all these parts, reckon on at least 1/2 hour per unit (which is probably cross-charged at the same $25 price of the board) So the whole "we can give schools a computer for the children to learn on for $25" turns out to be completely misleading
parents are anxious about the notion of allowing their children to experiment on an expensive home PC
Most parents don't have the vaguest notion of what their offspring do on a computer. The only thing they are more lacking in, is the ability to fix it if the little darlings do manage to screw it up.
In practice, the simplest, cheapest and quickest way to get children programming on a small Linux platform would be to install VirtualBox, whatever Linux image is suitable and then let rip. If this image does become irrevocably broken, a simple VM reinstall costs nothing and has no inherent risks. An alternative: simpler to produce but not as flexible would be a standalone RPi/Linux bootable CD with their "educational" environment on it.
If the RPi foundation was truly interested in improving programming skills in a classroom, they would have gone down either of these routes - not tried for 6 years to produce a cheap piece of hardware that needs everything from a keyboard to a power supply to be added on before it will do anything. I question their motives.
Nope, I can't say I've ever heard of him either. However, after listening to what he has to say - I'm not too surprised. His views don't appear to be very profound or insightful and I can't say that his piece made me sit up and reconsider anything.
So it turns out that he's just a guy with some rather pedestrian views. Fair enough, but hardly worthy of recognition.
First of all, assess the damage. How much time has it cost you to rectify the situation? Have you got your 2 domains back? If you can come up with a reasonable figure for the time and any commercial damage that has been done, set that against the cost of "lawyering up".
If you asked for this amount. I would expect your service provider would interpret it as the opening round in a negotiation and eventually you'll probably end up with about 50% of what you ask for. So make sure you've included everything in whatever you think you're due. Add on to that the time it will cost you to negotiate a fair settlement.
The only time it's worth the time, trouble and potential cost of involving a third party (who will probably take as much of your time as you'd spend reaching a solution on your own and will almost certainly earn much, much more from this than you'll ever receive: possibly from yourself - and double that for the other guy's lawyer, if you lose) is if you get stonewalled, or counter-sued. If you can possibly reach an agreement without involving others, you stand to get the fastest and most satisfactory outcome. Remember, this is not a money-making opportunity.
Any decent conference makes the proceedings available to attendees, so the notes that you need to take will not be the content of the various lectures.
What you will need to do is make contacts, do a bit of social networking and get to know the other people there (who are presumably in the same field that you are). For that, nothing beats a short written note - technology is far too clunky and it doesn't impress anyone, these days.
As soon as you train up people (they won't be teachers unless they actually start teaching children, read on... ) to be competent in computer or IT skills, they'll immediately go into better paid and more rewarding jobs using those skills - rather than passing them on to the children they were intended to teach. That's how the country got into the mess with all technology or science subjects: Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach (and those who can't teach, teach teaching).
So the end result will be a lot more IT people who also have a teaching qualification that they have no intention of using.
Until teaching certain subjects is moved outside the pay scales and working conditions of cash-strapped schools (and classes full of hostile "yoof" who have no will to learn, and can get a teacher fired just by making an unsubstantiated complaint against them) and made closer to the professionalism and salary structures of industry and commerce, there is little hope of getting talented people fronting up classrooms.
if he ever really goes down, he'll take a few politicians down with him
And that's his protection, right there. All the politicos in a lot of countries know that if they investigate his companies too deeply they'll uncover such a can of politically interconnected worms that their governments would have to relocate to the nearest jail.
He's been in so deep for so long that no major party would come out with clean hands, or be able to "cast the first stone". He knows it, they all know it and are just hoping that the media knows it too.
Deleting stuff is all very well. But unless you just do an "rm -rf *" and just be done with it. you need to invest some time in deciding what to remove, what to keep and whether that directory called family-photos really does contain what you expect it to. Even at minimum wage rates, the time spent trawling through a couple of TB of "stuff" could easily exceed the cost of a new disc - and then a background copy / backup onto it.
Obviously you still have an issue of tracking things down on the rare occasions when you actually need some of your family photos. But you can rest assured that they're in there somewhere and weren't purged last time you needed a few GB for more webserver logs.
Maybe the first step is to de-dup the existing data. You'll still have some manual intervention to check possible duplicates, but it's a first step towards tackling the bigger problem.
I think the naive answer is that whoever raised this tariff (or those who bribed the politicians to implement it) now expect the chinese to throw up their hands in surprise and say "Oh, I suppose we'd better stop making these panels in our cheap factories and start making them in unionised western factories instead.... No, I'm sure our customers in those countries won't mind paying 2 or 3 times what they pay now, since they'll know they're getting locally sourced product."
Just like has happened with every other consumer product that used to be made in the west...
Of all the phases needed to build a nuclear plant, the one that takes the longest is the planning stage. Getting all the permits, overcoming protests, NIMBYs, bribing the right (or left) politicians and quelling the opposition. We should be starting the publicity campaign and "educating" people that fusion is their future right now. That way, they'll actually welcome the arrival of commercial fusion power (changing the name to something less politically loaded is always a good idea, too).
That will knock at least a decade off the lead time - whenever that is due to start and is independent of the technology yet to be developed.
Given $1Tn, the pick of the best brains in the world to work willingly on the project, a large enough location away from any and all governmental regulation and every facility you could ever need - WHEN WILL IT BE COMMERCIALLY AVAILABLE?
The cost of the trip might only be half a mil, but the board and lodging on Mars would run to $1000's per night (minimum stay 8 months until the planetary alignment is right for the return trip). Got to make the money back somehow and it's not like there would be many alternative places to stay
Surely the pieces that an individual would choose to highlight (aside: highlight? why? not being an ebook person I don't understand this behaviour. I've never felt the need to highlight any passages in any of my proper books) would depend on the level of understanding one has of the passage. A section that one individual considers a revelation may be thought of as blindingly obvious, or boringly mundane, but others.
Maybe this behaviour tells us about the intellectual profile of the books' readers - or maybe just that some educational establishment somewhere had them on a reading list and the Cliff's Notes equivalent noted those paragraphs for the lemmings to follow?
So, when you're programming without an experienced manager above you, how do you go about improving?"
Document them.
Write man(1) pages, describe the source code, include hints about WHY you chose the algorithms you used (and which techniques didn't work). Have a high-level document to say what a program is intended to do, in what environment, with what limitations and how the output should be used (this works for "batch" right through to web pages and apps). Show how it should be built, what test data you used, what the results were and how the tests were performed.
If nothing else, yo will learn that writing source code is the easiest 10% of being a professional programmer and that the other 90% is a hard, dull slog. However, it's that other 90% that separates the "play" programmers from the professionals.
I doubt that any companies would be too interested in Mars. It appears to be a desolate hole and it's too far from every company's major markets.
However religious types don't seem to mind traveling long distances, suffering high death-rates and they may even be able to raise the money from their followers. The only problem then is that religious wars tend to be the most vicious and long-lasting of all types of war - so giving them a whole planet to fight over may not be the best idea.
1) What is your evidence that £65/week is "higher", cost-adjusted, than the wage at, say, Foxconn?
Didn't you think to do any research - anything at all, even a simple Google search, before spouting off.
A junior level worker in Shenzhen, China, will receive 1,800 yuan a month, according to Reuters, citing a statement by the Taiwan-based company. Monthly pay may rise to 2,200 yuan if the worker passes a technical examination. That puts the monthly pay at between $285 to $350,
That works out at about £2,600 p.a. for the top rate. Compare that with your own figure of £65/week or £3,380 for an unemployed brit.
As for all the rest of your uninformed rant: TLDR, since the first sentence was so wrong, there was no point.
Why do you assume that the same mistake - or one like it - would NOT have been made if the boards were assembled in the west? Since western wage rates are so much higher than chinese ones if this error had been made in a british or american plant it would probably be cheaper to simply crush the whole batch and start again,
Then instead of a 1 month delay, you'd be waiting 6 months - or never, since the RPi foundation would have gone bust as it was banking on the sales of these units.
No, the main reason it's not financially sensible to manufacture mass-appeal items in the UK is that the unemployment benefits are higher than chinese assembly workers' wages. You can't get native brits to take on menial work as they can get more money for being unemployed than, for example, picking vegetable or jobs that other stoop labour industries can afford to pay.
If these boards were to be assembled in the UK the costs of doing so (setting aside component costs and amortised developemnt costs) would make each board massively more expensive.
Different privacy "issues" affect people in different ways. Consequently there is no sensible way to assign a numerical score to a particular event (such as having your bank account number leaked) in absolute terms.
For example, if someone reveals an unwelcome fact about you on FB, the impact of that "outing" will depend of whether it affects your employability, whether you are interested in being employable (never forget: not everyone is a 20-something american. Some people are retired and don't care that pictures of them being arrested could fall into the hands of an HR person), whether a potential partner may see it - or it may even depend on the values and morals of the viewer. There are no absolutes.
Even having your credit card number taken is not necessarily a big deal, depending where you live. A lot of countries take a view that bank fraud is absorbed by the bank, not by an individual who blamelessly had their account targeted.
So, assigning numbers to event without taking into account the context, the situation of the people involved or the place where they live is largely meaningless. And once you do start to account for all these extra circumstances, any numerical evaluation becomes so specific that you can't generalise a level of threat or seriousness to a particular sort of privacy loss.
You don't need to bring psychology into this. It's merely an observation of human nature that some people get pleasure from the journey and others from arriving at the destination. Let's leave the technobabble out.
The phases that the "censorship" problem used to go through can be summarised thus:
Something is created
Someone tries to suppress its (free) distribution
Someone else finds a way to nullify that suppression
Other people start using the nullifying technique
The technique is "productionised" and rolled out to the masses
A new suppression scheme is developed...
Now, the problem is that instead of the above being simply a technical "game" any more, the rules have changed. More and more frequently a legal solution is used to stamp out the nullification process - and its developers get jailed or bankrupted by the costs of engaging in a legal process. In fact, it's frequently no longer necessary to actually prosecute people, simply to make the intention known, and if the individuals who discovered how to avoid censorship don't roll over - then pretty much every entity in the chain that supplies them with internet connectivity will, instead.
So the problem has evolved from being merely: the internet is a technical medium, we can form a technical "routing" round the problem, to being one where the censors are playing on their home ground and can use force, size and legal might to get their own way. And as with all things legal, whether it's just and fair is irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
Since these boards are intended for schools, these extras would need to be purchased, as they can't just be "scrounged" from other equipment - which would then, itself become unusable. In addition there is cost associated with integrating all these parts, reckon on at least 1/2 hour per unit (which is probably cross-charged at the same $25 price of the board) So the whole "we can give schools a computer for the children to learn on for $25" turns out to be completely misleading
parents are anxious about the notion of allowing their children to experiment on an expensive home PC
Most parents don't have the vaguest notion of what their offspring do on a computer. The only thing they are more lacking in, is the ability to fix it if the little darlings do manage to screw it up.
In practice, the simplest, cheapest and quickest way to get children programming on a small Linux platform would be to install VirtualBox, whatever Linux image is suitable and then let rip. If this image does become irrevocably broken, a simple VM reinstall costs nothing and has no inherent risks. An alternative: simpler to produce but not as flexible would be a standalone RPi/Linux bootable CD with their "educational" environment on it.
If the RPi foundation was truly interested in improving programming skills in a classroom, they would have gone down either of these routes - not tried for 6 years to produce a cheap piece of hardware that needs everything from a keyboard to a power supply to be added on before it will do anything. I question their motives.
200,000 is just the tip of the ....
Nope, I can't say I've ever heard of him either. However, after listening to what he has to say - I'm not too surprised. His views don't appear to be very profound or insightful and I can't say that his piece made me sit up and reconsider anything.
So it turns out that he's just a guy with some rather pedestrian views. Fair enough, but hardly worthy of recognition.
First of all, assess the damage. How much time has it cost you to rectify the situation? Have you got your 2 domains back? If you can come up with a reasonable figure for the time and any commercial damage that has been done, set that against the cost of "lawyering up".
If you asked for this amount. I would expect your service provider would interpret it as the opening round in a negotiation and eventually you'll probably end up with about 50% of what you ask for. So make sure you've included everything in whatever you think you're due. Add on to that the time it will cost you to negotiate a fair settlement.
The only time it's worth the time, trouble and potential cost of involving a third party (who will probably take as much of your time as you'd spend reaching a solution on your own and will almost certainly earn much, much more from this than you'll ever receive: possibly from yourself - and double that for the other guy's lawyer, if you lose) is if you get stonewalled, or counter-sued. If you can possibly reach an agreement without involving others, you stand to get the fastest and most satisfactory outcome. Remember, this is not a money-making opportunity.
The EU has consumer protection laws, the USA has class action lawsuits and guns. It probably balances out in all but bodycount.
Any decent conference makes the proceedings available to attendees, so the notes that you need to take will not be the content of the various lectures.
What you will need to do is make contacts, do a bit of social networking and get to know the other people there (who are presumably in the same field that you are). For that, nothing beats a short written note - technology is far too clunky and it doesn't impress anyone, these days.
As soon as you train up people (they won't be teachers unless they actually start teaching children, read on ... ) to be competent in computer or IT skills, they'll immediately go into better paid and more rewarding jobs using those skills - rather than passing them on to the children they were intended to teach. That's how the country got into the mess with all technology or science subjects: Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach (and those who can't teach, teach teaching).
So the end result will be a lot more IT people who also have a teaching qualification that they have no intention of using.
Until teaching certain subjects is moved outside the pay scales and working conditions of cash-strapped schools (and classes full of hostile "yoof" who have no will to learn, and can get a teacher fired just by making an unsubstantiated complaint against them) and made closer to the professionalism and salary structures of industry and commerce, there is little hope of getting talented people fronting up classrooms.
if he ever really goes down, he'll take a few politicians down with him
And that's his protection, right there. All the politicos in a lot of countries know that if they investigate his companies too deeply they'll uncover such a can of politically interconnected worms that their governments would have to relocate to the nearest jail.
He's been in so deep for so long that no major party would come out with clean hands, or be able to "cast the first stone". He knows it, they all know it and are just hoping that the media knows it too.
Obviously you still have an issue of tracking things down on the rare occasions when you actually need some of your family photos. But you can rest assured that they're in there somewhere and weren't purged last time you needed a few GB for more webserver logs.
Maybe the first step is to de-dup the existing data. You'll still have some manual intervention to check possible duplicates, but it's a first step towards tackling the bigger problem.
I think the naive answer is that whoever raised this tariff (or those who bribed the politicians to implement it) now expect the chinese to throw up their hands in surprise and say "Oh, I suppose we'd better stop making these panels in our cheap factories and start making them in unionised western factories instead. ... No, I'm sure our customers in those countries won't mind paying 2 or 3 times what they pay now, since they'll know they're getting locally sourced product."
Just like has happened with every other consumer product that used to be made in the west ...
That will knock at least a decade off the lead time - whenever that is due to start and is independent of the technology yet to be developed.
Given $1Tn, the pick of the best brains in the world to work willingly on the project, a large enough location away from any and all governmental regulation and every facility you could ever need - WHEN WILL IT BE COMMERCIALLY AVAILABLE?
100 trillion? Where is it in your ass that you're pulling these numbers from?
Don't you understand what the word "guess" means?
First job is to develop the materials, then a workable design, then raise the (guess) 100 trillion to build it. Maybe 200-500 years.
The cost of the trip might only be half a mil, but the board and lodging on Mars would run to $1000's per night (minimum stay 8 months until the planetary alignment is right for the return trip). Got to make the money back somehow and it's not like there would be many alternative places to stay
Maybe this behaviour tells us about the intellectual profile of the books' readers - or maybe just that some educational establishment somewhere had them on a reading list and the Cliff's Notes equivalent noted those paragraphs for the lemmings to follow?
So, when you're programming without an experienced manager above you, how do you go about improving?"
Document them.
Write man(1) pages, describe the source code, include hints about WHY you chose the algorithms you used (and which techniques didn't work). Have a high-level document to say what a program is intended to do, in what environment, with what limitations and how the output should be used (this works for "batch" right through to web pages and apps). Show how it should be built, what test data you used, what the results were and how the tests were performed.
If nothing else, yo will learn that writing source code is the easiest 10% of being a professional programmer and that the other 90% is a hard, dull slog. However, it's that other 90% that separates the "play" programmers from the professionals.
I doubt that any companies would be too interested in Mars. It appears to be a desolate hole and it's too far from every company's major markets.
However religious types don't seem to mind traveling long distances, suffering high death-rates and they may even be able to raise the money from their followers. The only problem then is that religious wars tend to be the most vicious and long-lasting of all types of war - so giving them a whole planet to fight over may not be the best idea.
I didn't realise the Daily Mail ....
Yawn! - and so completely wrong
1) What is your evidence that £65/week is "higher", cost-adjusted, than the wage at, say, Foxconn?
Didn't you think to do any research - anything at all, even a simple Google search, before spouting off.
A junior level worker in Shenzhen, China, will receive 1,800 yuan a month, according to Reuters, citing a statement by the Taiwan-based company. Monthly pay may rise to 2,200 yuan if the worker passes a technical examination. That puts the monthly pay at between $285 to $350,
That works out at about £2,600 p.a. for the top rate. Compare that with your own figure of £65/week or £3,380 for an unemployed brit.
As for all the rest of your uninformed rant: TLDR, since the first sentence was so wrong, there was no point.
Why do you assume that the same mistake - or one like it - would NOT have been made if the boards were assembled in the west? Since western wage rates are so much higher than chinese ones if this error had been made in a british or american plant it would probably be cheaper to simply crush the whole batch and start again,
Then instead of a 1 month delay, you'd be waiting 6 months - or never, since the RPi foundation would have gone bust as it was banking on the sales of these units.
No, the main reason it's not financially sensible to manufacture mass-appeal items in the UK is that the unemployment benefits are higher than chinese assembly workers' wages. You can't get native brits to take on menial work as they can get more money for being unemployed than, for example, picking vegetable or jobs that other stoop labour industries can afford to pay.
If these boards were to be assembled in the UK the costs of doing so (setting aside component costs and amortised developemnt costs) would make each board massively more expensive.
Different privacy "issues" affect people in different ways. Consequently there is no sensible way to assign a numerical score to a particular event (such as having your bank account number leaked) in absolute terms.
For example, if someone reveals an unwelcome fact about you on FB, the impact of that "outing" will depend of whether it affects your employability, whether you are interested in being employable (never forget: not everyone is a 20-something american. Some people are retired and don't care that pictures of them being arrested could fall into the hands of an HR person), whether a potential partner may see it - or it may even depend on the values and morals of the viewer. There are no absolutes.
Even having your credit card number taken is not necessarily a big deal, depending where you live. A lot of countries take a view that bank fraud is absorbed by the bank, not by an individual who blamelessly had their account targeted.
So, assigning numbers to event without taking into account the context, the situation of the people involved or the place where they live is largely meaningless. And once you do start to account for all these extra circumstances, any numerical evaluation becomes so specific that you can't generalise a level of threat or seriousness to a particular sort of privacy loss.
You don't need to bring psychology into this. It's merely an observation of human nature that some people get pleasure from the journey and others from arriving at the destination. Let's leave the technobabble out.
The phases that the "censorship" problem used to go through can be summarised thus:
Something is created ...
Someone tries to suppress its (free) distribution
Someone else finds a way to nullify that suppression
Other people start using the nullifying technique
The technique is "productionised" and rolled out to the masses
A new suppression scheme is developed
Now, the problem is that instead of the above being simply a technical "game" any more, the rules have changed. More and more frequently a legal solution is used to stamp out the nullification process - and its developers get jailed or bankrupted by the costs of engaging in a legal process. In fact, it's frequently no longer necessary to actually prosecute people, simply to make the intention known, and if the individuals who discovered how to avoid censorship don't roll over - then pretty much every entity in the chain that supplies them with internet connectivity will, instead.
So the problem has evolved from being merely: the internet is a technical medium, we can form a technical "routing" round the problem, to being one where the censors are playing on their home ground and can use force, size and legal might to get their own way. And as with all things legal, whether it's just and fair is irrelevant.