Re: [silk] OpenMoko - Thoughts?
On 26 Jun 2008, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So, who in silk-list is going to buy it and post a review? There is an Indian distributor[1]. I have placed an order and they were quite cool about payment. They don't accept credit cards but they have offered to send me the phone as soon as they have it and I need to pay them (by bank transfer) only when I have the phone. They also take back phones if you are not happy with them. I'm pretty sure that there are quite a few rough edges to the phone, but I do think endeavours such as this should be encouraged. Footnotes: [1] http://idasystems.net/freerunner -- Alok Courage is your greatest present need.
Re: [silk] OpenMoko - Thoughts?
On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 11:46 AM, Alok G. Singh [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: There is an Indian distributor[1]. I have placed an order and they were They describe the system as being Tri-bang GSM. I wonder if it uses all three bangs at once or sequentially. Ram
Re: [silk] OpenMoko - Thoughts?
Ramakrishnan Sundaram wrote: They describe the system as being Tri-bang GSM. I wonder if it uses all three bangs at once or sequentially. Ram More bang for your buck then.
Re: [silk] Food crisis, from NatGeo
On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 8:49 AM, J. Andrew Rogers wrote: in many parts of Asia to protect local farmers, due to the very high efficiency of American rice production, and consequently it is not worth it for American rice farmers to bother with the Asian export business. Isn't that efficiency + top-down subsidy ? I would make the observation that the situation has not yet become so bad that people are switching to more cost effective grains, choosing to pay more for their grain of habit instead. The switch is happening and its real... here in Kenya for example - many farmers have switched from growing corn and wheat (the local staples ) to other cash crops - like passion fruit, tree tomatoes, pyrethrum etc. Part of the reason is higher monetary yeild per hectare (which has become more important here because farms here have grown smaller and smaller because of familial inheritance and sub-division - and increase in human lifespan because of better health facilities... ). This switch from food crops to cash crops is happening not just at the small scale farmer level : http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/06/biofuels.alternativeenergy thats one of the primary rice production regions of the country being turned over to sugarcane for biofuel... the alternative is to import rice and maize but doing that wasnt cheap anyway because the country has always been primarily a net importer of goods and commodities (and in the near future of basic food...).
Re: [silk] Food crisis, from NatGeo
On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 10:24:41AM +0530, Udhay Shankar N wrote: In Australia a struggling farmer watches another harvest shrivel under the country's worst drought on record. Maybe people should look at the geological climate record for Australia. The continent is chronically drought-ridden, and oversalted. If you want to do sustainable agriculture in Oz, learn to desalinate seawater with solar power, and do drop irrigation. Another new member of the Chinese middle-class finally has enough cash to buy his first steak. And a U.S. agricultural executive decides to grow corn instead of wheat to take advantage of the growing demand for biofuels. There's no growing demand for biofuels. There's just some agribusiness lobby which wants to subsidize a process the thermodynamics of which is negative. http://petroleum.berkeley.edu/papers/patzek/CRPS416-Patzek-Web.pdf http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3786 Alone, none of these events would have been responsible for today's troubled stock markets, rampant civil unrest, and increasing famine and malnourishment for the world's poor. (See a video on the world food crisis.) Together, they've caused the world's worst food crisis in a generation. Entirely self-fabricated. In response to the agflation, belt-tightening has become commonplace even in affluent areas such as the U.S. and Europe. Affluent? Going rapidly. The demographics, loss of unemployment and lack of growth are making affluence a thing of the past. These events often occurred in line with predictions about global warming, the effects of which are expected in increase in coming years. (Related: Warming May Cause Crop Failures, Food Shortages by 2030 [January 31, 2008].) May? Many people also blame the prices on an increased use of biofuels in developed nations—in particular ethanol produced from corn—due to subsidies and changing fuel standards. Absolutely. Biofuels don't work. (With the possible exception of single-cell algae). Government officials from several nations have claimed that biofuels are only a small contributor to the price increases. But critics counter that increasing food production in a time of crisis should outweigh energy needs. Markets have panicked, with countries rushing to make large purchases of grains and speculators also buying up stock in anticipation of even more price increases. Many countries have since launched efforts to stamp out hoarding and price-gouging and ensure the smooth flow of food to consumers. Markets haven't panicked. Not yet. So the only answer, experts say, is to increase the amount of food grown on existing land, using more efficient methods—which will require years of research and investment. I smell an agenda here. Beginning in the early 1970s, after the last great food crisis, there was a big and sustained increase in investment in agricultural productivity, Tyner explained. Sustained? Whom are they kidding? New crop varieties and more efficient farming methods led to enormous increases in output, he said, but those gains begin to slow down in the '90s, helping to set the stage for the current crisis. When you can hold steady for a couple hundred years, let's talk about whether that's sustainable. We need to look long-term, because we've got a long-term problem, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer said at a recent press briefing on food and fuel. What do they mean by long-term? 20 years? 30? If you look at how to deal with this, we need to convince other nations in this world to increase yields. And that means the use of biotechnology products. It means better water management, better Actually, it doesn't. Biological and biological-dynamical methods (specific organic agriculture) methods would do. They're moderately more labor-intensive, which would require more automation and robotics to scale well. fertilizer management, and precision farming methods, he said. If other countries do not increase yields comparable to those that we see here in the United States, people are going to go hungry. It's that simple. Given how much nonrenewable energy goes into agriculture in the US and the nonsustainability of the process (it kills the soil, pollutes the water table and the aquifiers) the world would be ill advised to copy the US model. -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a http://leitl.org __ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
Re: [silk] Nationalise the InterTubes
On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 11:27 AM, Gautam John [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Bejeezus! This would be such a horrifically bad idea. __ Should the Internet be owned and maintained by the government, just like the highways? Vint Cerf, the father of the Internet and Google's Internet evangelist, made this radical suggestion NO...never heard of a father wanting to bastardize his legitimate child before... Deepa.
Re: [silk] Nationalise the InterTubes
On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 03:59:57PM +0530, Deepa Mohan wrote: NO...never heard of a father wanting to bastardize his legitimate child before... The Internet is just a transport layer between any two points. The more knobs the interim fabric has the more potential for abuse and screwup. Any authority (address, namespace, routing whatever) is a single point of failure. As things stand the current network architecture is doomed. We can make a list of what a future network must do. So far, there are no candidates to even cover parts of the requirements. Meanwhile, we have to survive by building next-generation networks as a virtual layer on the existing one, and then swap it (tunnel the old-style protocols over the next-generation fabric). -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a http://leitl.org __ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
[silk] Disadvantages of an Elite education
This is pretty much the story of my university education. Gautam, Alok, ring any bells? http://www.theamericanscholar.org/su08/elite-deresiewicz.html The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who arent like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely-indeed increasingly-homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it. Witness the last two Democratic presidential nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry: one each from Harvard and Yale, both earnest, decent, intelligent men, both utterly incapable of communicating with the larger electorate. But it isnt just a matter of class. My education taught me to believe that people who didnt go to an Ivy League or equivalent school werent worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were the best and the brightest, as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright. I learned to give that little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic Oh, when people told me they went to a less prestigious college. (If Id gone to Harvard, I would have learned to say in Boston when I was asked where I went to school-the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige.) I never learned that there are smart people who dont go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are smart people who dont go to college at all. I also never learned that there are smart people who arent smart. The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic. While this is broadly true of all universities, elite schools, precisely because their students (and faculty, and administrators) possess this one form of intelligence to such a high degree, are more apt to ignore the value of others. One naturally prizes what one most possesses and what most makes for ones advantages. But social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite. The best are the brightest only in one narrow sense. One needs to wander away from the educational elite to begin to discover this.
Re: [silk] Disadvantages of an Elite education
I don't think this is a set of experiences I can fully identify with. To be sure, there are parts, such as the incestuous belief in superiority and of self-worth that do resonate. -- Please read our new blog at: http://blog.prathambooks.org/
Re: [silk] Disadvantages of an Elite education
On 26-Jun-08, at 6:54 PM, Gautam John wrote: To be sure, there are parts, such as the incestuous belief in superiority and of self-worth that do resonate. Intellectual arrogance, which a past mentor helped me observe as being rather commonplace, and which I dare say I've seen in myself, despite having attended no college at all. I had trouble identifying with that article.
Re: [silk] OpenMoko - Thoughts? (was Re: IPhone - Thoughts?)
I broke down and bought GTA01, too many issues and the phone was pretty much unusable as a phone. They've changed over to using Qtopia now for the default interface though, and hopefully solved their GSM bugs but the whole process is very very design-by-committee and hence sucky. I hope FreeRunner does well, but don't really have high hopes. Cheers, Aditya -- Aditya (http://aditya.sublucid.com) On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 5:37 PM, Thaths [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mon, Jul 9, 2007 at 12:58 PM, Aditya Chadha [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Has anyone seen/used one of the FIC 1973 / OpenMoko phones? It sounds like a very viable alternative to the closed apple/att hell. Looks like non-developer devices have started shipping: http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS9978560959.html So, who in silk-list is going to buy it and post a review? S. -- Bart: We were just planning the father-son river rafting trip. Homer: Hehe. You don't have a son. Sudhakar Chandra Slacker Without Borders
Re: [silk] Nationalise the InterTubes
Eugen Leitl [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Meanwhile, we have to survive by building next-generation networks as a virtual layer on the existing one, and then swap it (tunnel the old-style protocols over the next-generation fabric). The internet *is* a virtual layer on top of other networks. No one runs IP as the data link layer. :) That's why the internet is so flexible and survives so well. Perry
