You can use an Arduino to learn Forth

http://playground.arduino.cc/CommonTopics/ForthOnArduino

Funny Bretzel wants you to build something rather than learning how to code

This guy thinks that code generation is enough:

http://funnybretzel.com/dont-learn-how-to-write-code/

I suspect that the solutions that he points to involve a lot of Javascript. My Chrome is having trouble rendering the pages, so I can't try the demos that he suggests.

Vandana Shiva on myths of poverty

Two myths that keep the world poor

Vandana Shiva

This article appeared in Ode issue: 28

Global poverty is a hot topic right now. But anyone serious about ending it needs to understand the true causes, argues Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva.

From rock singer Bob Geldof to UK politician Gordon Brown, the world suddenly seems to be full of high-profile people with their own plans to end poverty. Jeffrey Sachs, however, is not a simply a do-gooder but one of the world¹s leading economists, head of the Earth Institute and in charge of a UN panel set up to promote rapid development. So when he launched his book The End of Poverty, people everywhere took notice. Time magazine even made it into a cover story.

But, there is a problem with Sachs' how-to-end poverty prescriptions. He simply doesn't understand where poverty comes from. He seems to view it as the original sin. "A few generations ago, almost everybody was poor," he writes, then adding: "The Industrial Revolution led to new riches, but much of the world was left far behind."

This is a totally false history of poverty. The poor are not those who have been "left behind"; they are the ones who have been robbed. The wealth accumulated by Europe and North America are largely based on riches taken from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Without the destruction of India's rich textile industry, without the takeover of the spice trade, without the genocide of the native American tribes, without African slavery, the Industrial Revolution would not have resulted in new riches for Europe or North America. It was this violent takeover of Third World resources and markets that created wealth in the North and poverty in the South. Two of the great economic myths of our time allow people to deny this intimate link, and spread misconceptions about what poverty is.

First, the destruction of nature and of people's ability to look after themselves are blamed not on industrial growth and economic colonialism, but on poor people themselves. Poverty, it is stated, causes environmental destruction. The disease is then offered as a cure: further economic growth is supposed to solve the very problems of poverty and ecological decline that it gave rise to in the first place. This is the message at the heart of Sachs' analysis.

The second myth is an assumption that if you consume what you produce, you do not really produce, at least not economically speaking. If I grow my own food, and do not sell it, then it doesn't contribute to GDP, and therefore does not contribute towards "growth".

People are perceived as "poor" if they eat food they have grown rather than commercially distributed junk foods sold by global agri-business. They are seen as poor if they live in self-built housing made from ecologically well-adapted materials like bamboo and mud rather than in cinder block or cement houses. They are seen as poor if they wear garments manufactured from handmade natural fibres rather than synthetics.

Yet sustenance living, which the wealthy West perceives as poverty, does not necessarily mean a low quality of life. On the contrary, by their very nature economies based on sustenance ensure a high quality of life measured in terms of access to good food and water, opportunities for sustainable livelihoods, robust social and cultural identity, and a sense of meaning in people's lives . Because these poor don't share in the perceived benefits of economic growth, however, they are portrayed as those "left behind".

This false distinction between the factors that create affluence and those that create poverty is at the core of Sachs' analysis. And because of this, his prescriptions will aggravate and deepen poverty instead of ending it. Modern concepts of economic development, which Sachs sees as the "cure" for poverty, have been in place for only a tiny portion of human history. For centuries, the principles of sustenance allowed societies all over the planet to survive and even thrive. Limits in nature were respected in these societies and guided the limits of human consumption. When society's relationship with nature is based on sustenance, nature exists as a form of common wealth. It is redefined as a "resource" only when profit becomes the organising principle of society and sets off a financial imperative for the development and destruction of these resources for the market. However much we choose to forget or deny it, all people in all societies still depend on nature. Without clean water, fertile soils and genetic diversity, human survival is not possible. Today, economic development is destroying these onetime commons, resulting in the creation of a new contradiction: development deprives the very people it professes to help of their traditional land and means of sustenance, forcing them to survive in an increasingly eroded natural world.

A system like the economic growth model we know today creates trillions of dollars of super profits for corporations while condemning billions of people to poverty. Poverty is not, as Sachs suggests, an initial state of human progress from which to escape. It is a final state people fall into when one-sided development destroys the ecological and social systems that have maintained the life, health and sustenance of people and the planet for ages. The reality is that people do not die for lack of income. They die for lack of access to the wealth of the commons. Here, too, Sachs is wrong when he says: "In a world of plenty, 1 billion people are so poor their lives are in danger." The indigenous people in the Amazon, the mountain communities in the Himalayas, peasants anywhere whose land has not been appropriated and whose water and biodiversity have not been destroyed by debt-creating industrial agriculture are ecologically rich, even though they earn less than a dollar a day.

On the other hand, people are poor if they have to purchase their basic needs at high prices no matter how much income they make. Take the case of India. Because of cheap food and fibre being dumped by developed nations and lessened trade protections enacted by the government, farm prices in India are tumbling, which means that the country¹s peasants are losing $26 billion U.S. each year. Unable to survive under these new economic conditions, many peasants are now poverty-stricken and thousands commit suicide each year. Elsewhere in the world, drinking water is privatised so that corporations can now profit to the tune of $1 trillion U.S. a year by selling an essential resource to the poor that was once free. And the $50 billion U.S. of "aid" trickling North to South is but a tenth of the $500 billion being sucked in the other direction due to interest payments and other unjust mechanisms in the global economy imposed by the World Bank and the IMF.

If we are serious about ending poverty, we have to be serious about ending the systems that create poverty by robbing the poor of their common wealth, livelihoods and incomes. Before we can make poverty history, we need to get the history of poverty right. It¹s not about how much wealthy nations can give, so much as how much less they can take.

Taken and adapted with kind permission from The Ecologist (July/August 2005), a British monthly devoted to discussion of environmental issues, international politics and globalization. More information: The Ecologist, Unit 18 Chelsea Wharf, 15 Lots Road, London, SW10 0XJ, England, theecologist@galleon.co.uk, www.theecologist.org

Dr. Vandana Shiva is a physicist and prominent Indian environmental activist. She founded Navdanya, a movement for biodiversity conservation and farmers' rights. She directs the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy. Her most recent books are Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge and Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply.

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https://www.organicconsumers.org/old_articles/btc/shiva112305.php

$5 wireless board

http://makezine.com/2015/04/01/esp8266-5-microcontroller-wi-fi-now-arduino-compatible/

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See also: http://www.instructables.com/id/Using-the-ESP8266-module/?ALLSTEPS

technology issues 2015 10 16

http://www.iafrikan.com/2015/10/15/building-a-new-robotics-ecosystem-in-egypt/

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http://developer.telerik.com/featured/16-ways-to-search-find-and-edit-with-chrome-devtools/

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http://blog.serversaustralia.com.au/ultimate-list-of-cheatsheets-for-a-sysadmin

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https://medium.com/@garywiz/five-things-old-programmers-need-to-remember-e78caf0b0973

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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/15/junk_your_it_now_before_it_drags_you_under/

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http://profit.ndtv.com/news/corporates/article-flipkart-sells-half-a-million-handsets-in-10-hours-1232489

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http://www.karan.org/blog/2015/10/15/portable-cloud/

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https://medium.com/moze-stories/developer-by-accident-e8963bdfdcfe

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https://medium.com/@jerols/6-things-we-learned-from-running-a-private-crowdfunding-campaign-33ac835de4dd

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http://www.elegantcoding.com/2011/11/eleven-equations-true-computer-science.html

Adafruit's approach to Arduino wireless

Adafruit has some wireless products such as this one:

http://www.adafruit.com/product/2471

Apparently it can be programmed with the standard Arduino IDE:

https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino

Perhaps Carl Bass is too optimistic about new jobs

Unca Bob wrote:

Autodesk CEO Carl Bass says that just as we have created new, higher-paying jobs in every other industrial transition, we will create a new set of industries and professions in this one. Look at the new types of jobs and multi-billion dollar businesses that the Internet and mobile industries created—these came out of nowhere and changed our lives, Bass says.

This seems technically correct but misleading.
Suppose a 20th century automobile factory had 500 middle class workers. That might include 20 supervisors, 100 welders, 100 machine-lube-fillers, 80 typists, 100 lathe operators, 100 other assorted greasemonkeys.
The 21st century wipes out most of those jobs. The factory makes the same number of cars with five guys - an accountant, a computer programmer, a special robot wrangler, a nanotech specialist, and a human resources officer.
Yeah, great. The robotic age has invented two totally new professions, namely robot wrangler and nanotech nerd. Hooray for them, and I'm glad they have middle-class jobs.
But in fact, even though you have created two new professions, you've eliminated 99% of the middle class jobs.
Instagram had only 13 employees when it was bought out by the Borg. (Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated.)
Instagram created a lot of value, but it did not employ huge masses of workers to do that.
The 21st century might manage to save GDP while destroying the workers.

Electronic design utilities

https://upverter.com/

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https://www.circuitlab.com/

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http://www.docircuits.com/

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https://123d.circuits.io/

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http://www.digikey.com/en/resources/dkedu

Haystack, OpenTag, Dash7 - a possible start on the Internet of Things. Also, MangOH

Sierra Wireless offers IoT Connectors on the MangOH
http://source.sierrawireless.com/iotconnector/
http://source.sierrawireless.com/legato/
http://source.sierrawireless.com/mangoh/
and that looks like another nice Linux platform.
Somewhat more ambitious is Dash7. Apparently the guys behind it have sold large numbers to defense buyers already.
http://www.indigresso.com/wiki/doku.php?id=opentag:main#features_overview
http://www.indigresso.com/wiki/doku.php?id=dash7_mode_2:main
Apparently this is dominated, if not entirely controlled,by just one corp:
http://haystacktechnologies.com/
http://haystacktechnologies.com/_dev/products-and-services/hdf-1-0/
and they have a particular product ... but the links appear to be dead.
However, they have some working slides from 2012:
http://www.slideshare.net/haystacktech/dash7-haystack-the-internet-of-things-webinar
http://www.slideshare.net/MaartenWeyn1/dash7-alliance-protocol-technical-presentation
http://www.slideshare.net/jpnorair/introduction-to-dash7-technology-1698125
and if I understand this rightly, they promise that the IoT built with their magic will be spiderable:
https://medium.com/@patburns/why-you-can-t-google-the-internet-of-things-1f1207212a75
I like the looks of Dash7. It looks better than this:
http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2015/09/acers-arduino-based-cloud-professor-wants-to-get-kids-into-the-iot/
I like the promise that it can support crypto:
https://medium.com/the-startup-magazine-collection/a-simple-proposal-to-improve-security-for-the-internet-of-things-4fcc0663f70e
Bonus update: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~rtm/roofnet-b.pdf
Multihop rooftop meshnets look pretty cool.

Maker-relevant links ｆｏｒ ２０１５ ０９ １０

Fanatical Victorian lifestyle activists are quite literally MAKING a Victorian life: http://www.vox.com/2015/9/9/9275611/victorian-era-life

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http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2421252,00.asp Teal Deer: BitDefender is looking like a better choice than AVG.

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Update:Ｓｅｒｉｏｕｓ　ＨＡＣＫＳ http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/09/how-highly-advanced-hackers-abused-satellites-to-stay-under-the-radar/ 　

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You can build HaskellR in a Docker container: http://www.tweag.io/blog/programming-r-at-native-speed-using-haskell

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You can make a language in seven lines of Scheme: http://matt.might.net/articles/implementing-a-programming-language/

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You can make a map of RF with software-defined radios: https://medium.com/@BeepLabs/fun-with-software-defined-radios-d547c83a7492

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You can make an extra control key from a Yamaha pedal: http://blog.rogach.org/2015/09/diy-control-pedal-on-linux.html

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Bonus: We can make a better alternative to HTTP: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmNhFJjGcMPqpuYfxL62VVB9528NXqDNMFXiqN5bgFYiZ1/its-time-for-the-permanent-web.html We can make it with Tim Berners-Lee: http://nicola.io/decentralized-principles/2015/

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http://www.openculture.com/2015/09/the-british-library-puts-over-1000000-images-in-the-public-domain-a-deeper-dive-into-the-collection.html

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Bonus Postscript: Suppose there was a profession called "maker." What does a maker do? A maker makes things! Dinner. Birdhouses. Pants. Shopping malls. Camera lenses. Jet engines. Hydroelectric power stations. Pianos. Mars landers. Being a maker is a rough business. It's such a wide-ranging field, and just because you've made hundreds of flowerpots doesn't give you any kind of edge if you need to make a catalytic converter for a 1995 Ford truck. ... Everything you build is to a great extent a research project. How do you come to grips with something you have no concrete experience with? By running experiments. Lots of little throwaway coding and interface experiments that answer questions and settle your mind. Writing a PNG decoder, for example, is a collection of dozens of smaller problems, most of which can be fiddled around with in isolation with real code. Any significant app has user interactions that need prototyping, unclear and conflicting design options to explore, tricky bits of logic, API calls you've never used--hundreds of things. Maybe five hundred. And until you run those experiments, you won't have a solid understanding of what you're making. http://prog21.dadgum.com/148.html

Palau's access to SSL just got revoked ... clearly this means we need a decentralized alternative to SSL

http://colin.keigher.ca/2015/09/geotrustsymantec-has-revoked-all-ssl.html SSL apparently depends on certificates that come from some kind of hierarchical authority. The solution is to decentralize.

Herrick Kimball: the ability to supply our own needs. That is the very definition of independence

Kimball quoted Jefferson: “Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.” http://thedeliberateagrarian.blogspot.tw/2009/03/vv.html Definition of "venal" adjective 1. willing to sell one's influence, especially in return for a bribe; open to bribery; mercenary: a venal judge. 2. able to be purchased, as by a bribe: venal acquittals. 3. associated with or characterized by bribery: a venal administration; venal agreements. See also: http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/other/libertarianism-anarchism-monopolies-and-land-3650 File that under "good reasons why anarchist visions are unrealistic."

Bitcoin is being censored by the ISPs themselves, and they won't even tell you that.

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-September/010798.html

Link roundup

http://imgur.com/gallery/Dy79J I might actually need a simple proxy service, depending on how bad my ISPs are: https://getlantern.org/ Lantern is a free desktop application that delivers fast, reliable and secure access to the open Internet. It seems to be a different product than this, which seems to be hardware: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/lantern-one-device-free-data-from-space-forever#/story

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http://deathtobullshit.com/ http://darkpatterns.org/ https://www.loannow.com/bank-overdraft-policy-reform-overdue/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10113639 http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/how-companies-make-millions-off-lead-poisoned-poor-blacks/2015/08/25/7460c1de-0d8c-11e5-9726-49d6fa26a8c6_story.html

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Jury nullification is understandably controversial — and is especially resented by courts and prosecutors. It is the notion that jurors can ignore the law and follow their conscience when they believe the law would dictate a miscarriage of justice. But it is hardly a new concept. In one of the most celebrated colonial trials, for example, a jury acquitted newspaper editor Peter Zenger of libeling the royal governor even though Zenger was technically guilty under the law and the judge basically told jurors to find him guilty. In the 19th century, Northern juries refused to convict abolitionists for harboring runaway slaves. In the 20th century, juries often balked at enforcing Prohibition and later, on occasion, at what they considered overly harsh drug laws or laws governing sexual behavior. Jury nullification had a darker strain, too, as Southern juries would sometimes refuse to convict white defendants guilty of racial violence. The point is that jury nullification is not some crank theory concocted out of the blue. As First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh has written, "It's clear that it's not a crime for jurors to refuse to convict even when the jury instructions seem to call for a guilty verdict." http://www.denverpost.com/editorials/ci_28662070/jury-nullification-is-not-crime-denver/mobile-web

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http://www.hakspek.com/security/updates-make-windows-7-and-8-spy-on-you-like-windows-10/ http://www.hakspek.com/security/windows-script-to-remove-all-windows-10-telemetry-updates/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10110155

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Data brokers swindle you out of 4th Amendment rights: https://thestack.com/security/2015/08/24/how-corporate-data-brokers-sell-your-life-and-why-you-should-be-concerned/

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https://www.mailvelope.com/en/blog/gmx-and-web-de-launch-pgp Encrypted email isn't popular yet.

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http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/meet-mr-wizard-science-guy-inspired-bill-nye-180956371/

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http://www.zeit.de/digital/datenschutz/2015-08/xkeyscore-nsa-domestic-intelligence-agency

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http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/08/how-security-flaws-work-the-buffer-overflow/

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"the art of establishing the maximum inequality in our own favour."

an accumulation of real property is of little use to its owner, unless, together with it, he has commercial power over labour. Thus, suppose any person to be put in possession of a large estate of fruitful land, with rich beds of gold in its gravel, countless herds of cattle in its pastures; houses, and gardens, and storehouses full of useful stores; but suppose, after all, that he could get no servants? In order that he may be able to have servants, some one in his neighbourhood must be poor, and in want of his gold -- or his corn. Assume that no one is in want of either, and that no servants are to be had. He must, therefore, bake his own bread, make his own clothes, plough his own ground, and shepherd his own flocks. His gold will be as useful to him as any other yellow pebbles on his estate. His stores must rot, for he cannot consume them. He can eat no more than another man could eat, and wear no more than another man could wear. He must lead a life of severe and common labour to procure even ordinary comforts; he will be ultimately unable to keep either houses in repair, or fields in cultivation; and forced to content himself with a poor man's portion of cottage and garden, in the midst of a desert of waste land, trampled by wild cattle, and encumbered by ruins of palaces, which he will hardly mock at himself by calling "his own." The most covetous of mankind would, with small exultation, I presume, accept riches of this kind on these terms. What is really desired, under the name of riches, is essentially, power over men; in its simplest sense, the power of obtaining for our own advantage the labour of servant, tradesman, and artist; in wider sense, authority of directing large masses of the nation to various ends (good, trivial or hurtful, according to the mind of the rich person). And this power of wealth of course is greater or less in direct proportion to the poverty of the men over whom it is exercised, and in inverse proportion to the number of persons who are as rich as ourselves, and who are ready to give the same price for an article of which the supply is limited. If the musician is poor, he will sing for small pay, as long as there is only one person who can pay him; but if there be two or three, he will sing for the one who offers him most. And thus the power of the riches of the patron (always imperfect and doubtful, as we shall see presently, even when most authoritative) depends first on the poverty of the artist, and then on the limitation of the number of equally wealthy persons, who also want seats at the concert. So that, as above stated, the art of becoming "rich," in the common sense, is not absolutely nor finally the art of accumulating much money for ourselves, but also of contriving that our neighbours shall have less. In accurate terms, it is "the art of establishing the maximum inequality in our own favour." -Ruskin http://www.efm.bris.ac.uk/het/ruskin/ruskin

Electronics are nifty

I really need to test out Google Analytics, and I think a new post is in order.

This post tests a tracking script from Google

The only purpose of this post is to allow the tracking script from Google to function.

But in the meantime, there ought to be a graphic or something.