[wsfii-discuss] disasters and telecom

Sun Oct 16 12:26:08 UTC 2005

> 
> 1. The example I already gave: if the people who first saw the tsunami 
> had been able to warn other coastal areas, many lives would have been saved.
> 2. Simple GSM transmission detectors could help find people buried under 
> rubble. Tiny robots might be able to reach where people cannot.
> 3. That there is poverty and illiteracy in the world in such large 
> percentages, is a conspiracy. The middle and upper classes are quite 
> happy with the state of affairs, and since they decide how money is 

I doubt anyone is happy in this world at all. Most people which are not
desperately fightnig for their basic needs are living in an automaton
conformist consumerist mode which, at least how I understood from
Fromm's analysis, is far from happiness.

> allocated, guess what it is spent on. The per capita spending on 
> education and health for a child in a rural area in India is far lower 
> than equivalent amounts for middle class kids. The only way, IMO, for 
> this to change, is for the poor to have access to information, the 

You can take bread from your home and give it to someone poor. You are
not going to achieve anything - the total level of poverty stays the
same.

Or you can teach one poor man agriculture -> you feed one human for his
lifetime and waste significant time yourself. Considering the fact there
are billion more starving, you aren't basically going to fix anything
anyway.

Or you can waste significant time teaching masses how to do agriculture.
But they have to buy material and they don't have money anyway so it's
going to be useless anyway.

Or you can develop a way for these poor masses to be able to eventually
manufacture anything without any additional requirements. Which is
called User Controlled Technology (UCT). And it could change something.

I think one should spend his time the most efficient way he can deliver
because he has a limited amount (approx. 80 years) of time to spend.

For example my friend in Prague built this burner:
http://www.svetoutdooru.cz/Users/Clanky/clanek.asp?id_clanku=890

We went into a valley with a creek to test it and it it's a hell's device.
I grabbed a handful of dripping wet dead leaves just from the running
water of the creek and put them into the running fire and it was still
running smoothly and happily on this shit. Such a device could be used
by poor for cooking on any organic shit and saving the tropical woods
from being burned down for fuel.

But you need UCT. Poor people don't have money to buy commercial device
and if you don't provide 100% reliable and optimized building guide,
they won't be able to build it themselves anyway. Their whole life is
presumably filled with struggling for basic needs and they cannot afford
wasting extra time wasting experimenting how to fix what one was lazy to
implement correctly in a crappy building guide.

They are also not going to develop anything themselves. Developing
even the simplest UCT thing takes horrible amounts of time and thousands
of people are not going to replicate the effort. But if you do the
effort properly once as skilled and experienced UCT developer, they will
provide bugfix suggestions for free, translations, and maybe even help
with development themselves.

And the most problem in UCT is not a lack of promotion (UCT works even
without promotion), but a lack of developer time. When I am working on
proprietary technology 42.5 hours a week (not counting lunch), as is
customary in CH, I am going to develop almost nothing in my spare time.

So the priority is to find a mechanism how UCT developers can
sustainably develop UCT fulltime for living.

> ability to find others in the same condition, to organise, and to 
> attract international attention through media. For that, they need 
> access to technologies that facilitate the gathering, processing and 
> dissemination of information.
> 4. Once, computing was centralized, you had mainframe computers. The 
> introduction of personal computing brought about many benefits, not 
> least the growth of the Internet. Is there a need to discuss whether the 
> Internet is useful or not? In telecom, we all carry 
> transmitter/receivers, that cannot talk to each other except via a 
> central switch, for which we have to pay rent (as we did for time on a 
> mainframe once). This is because the system is closed. Our effort is to 
> open up all these areas.

The only reasonable way I see how to solve this problem in middle-range
future is a network of FSO backbones with WiFi AP's on the end instead
of BTS, and then UCT embedded devices running Linux or other free
software OS implementing WiFi mobile phone with some standard open
protocol (SIP, h323)

CL<
> 5. Does anyone need convincing with regard to the usefulness of maps? An 
> example would be the tracking of encroachments on public spaces by 
> government, religious bodies, private interests. Maps are still highly 
> restricted in countries such as India. Open maps are therefore highly 
> significant.
> 
> I could go on: bottom line, information is power, and the more open 
> information is, the harder it becomes for the powerful to make a mockery 
> of democracy.
> 
> Arun
> 
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