who just had a heart attack: http://www.forbes.com/sites/go...
"The man credited with turning Samsung into one of the world's most powerful companies is in recovery after suffering a heart attack on Saturday night. In an official statement Samsung confirmed Chairman Lee Kun-hee, 72, was rushed to hospital and treated with CPR. Both the company and hospital officials have declined to say how long he is expected to be hospitalised."

We have a Samsung SSD, a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 Tablet, and quite a few Samsung LCD displays, among other things Samsung. Thanks for the quality products, and thanks for apologizing about the leukemia risk among Samsung workers and offering to help them and their families. Now here is some advice that could help Chairman Lee Kun-hee back to good health. I hope he gets it in time. Please let the appropriate people know if you are connected to Samsung.

Aggressive nutritional therapy by eating a lot of vegetables and some other things can reverse heart disease, as practiced by Dr. Joel Fuhrman and others:
https://www.drfuhrman.com/dise...
"When it comes to combating heart disease, most information sources promote drugs and surgery as the only viable lines of defense. As a result, the demand for high-tech, expensive and largely ineffective medical care is overwhelming, causing medical costs and insurance rates to skyrocket. This chase for "cures" is both financially devastating and futile. Morbidity and premature mortality from heart disease continue to rise with no sign of abating. Interventional cardiology offers only partial benefits, since these procedures do not remove the causes of the problem. Attempts to intervene with invasive procedures or surgery after the damage already has been done have not been shown to offer a significant reduction in cardiac deaths.
    We need to keep in mind that angioplasty and bypass surgery have some significant adverse outcomes, including heart attacks, stroke and death. These invasive procedures only attempt to treat a small segment of the diseased heart, usually with only temporary benefit. Patients treated with angioplasty and bypass surgery continue to experience progressive disability, and most still die prematurely as a result of their heart disease.
    The average person is not aware that there are safer, more effective options available. Unfortunately, government agencies are often slow to respond to new scientific information and continue to advocate outdated recommendations. Economic and political forces also make it difficult for Americans to be clearly informed that heart disease is self-induced and totally avoidable by eating a diet of nutritional excellence."

The same is no doubt true in many other countries, probably including South Korea. Even GW Bush got scammed in that sense:
"Was George W. Bush's stent necessary?"
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
"President Bush needed aggressive nutritional counseling and potentially life-saving nutritional information. It sounds like he was not properly informed of these studies documenting the ineffectiveness of PCI and the value of the proper dietary intervention. If not, I consider that malpractice. Every potential candidate for angioplasty (PCI) should know that their disease can be effectively reversed via superior nutrition and that surgical interventions are not protective against future events. Remember too, that almost half of all those on optimal medical therapy for high cholesterol and high blood pressure, still ultimately suffer heart attacks. Was President Bush informed about Dr. Ornish's Lifestyle Heart Trial, which scientifically documented that lifestyle changes alone can reverse coronary artery disease? Even President Clinton could have shared his experience and expertise, since he worsened after his PCI and is doing well after adopting a healthy vegan diet. Who knows what happened, but it seems unlikely given the media reports. It sounds like President Bush was misinformed about PCI by his doctors and given the false impression this procedure was life-extending and lifesaving. Certainly the media reports are giving this impression to the American people that this procedure was necessary for him."

See also Bill Clinton's current dietary strategy to deal with his heart disease.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH...

And also the story of millionaire Joe Cross' path back to health via good nutrition:
http://www.fatsickandnearlydea...

Sadly such health advice probably does not make it to the top very often -- although I keep trying:
"Larry Page & Sergey Brin hopefully getting enough sunlight and vegetables?"
https://groups.google.com/foru...

But maybe at least someone else reading this might benefit it in any case. But I still was encouraged to send this by the fact Samsung was trying to do the right thing healthwise for its workers. Good luck!

The Mechanical Universe: http://www.learner.org/resourc...
The World of Chemistry : http://www.learner.org/resourc...

Not sure how they look on a cell phone screen, but they were both informative on regular TV and laptop screens. I watched both for fun twenty years ago (post college), and also the one on chemistry with my kid a few years back (the physics one was not as engaging though). I liked being able to rewind them to review some complex issue several times. They are not the same as doing hands-on lab exercises though.

There is also the Khan Academy now, which also has a supportive community and online problem sets in some areas. So, I'd say good things are possible. Of course, so much of schooling is boring if it is not what you want to be doing at the time. That's part of why I prefer learned-directed education as much as possible, including via homeschooling/unschooling.

Self-replicating space habitats that could duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore were a long favorite "ark" idea of mine to deal with the risk of global nuclear war (although JD Bernal proposed them first in the 1920s it turns out). Anyway, arks are just another option to umbrellas -- given umbrellas may not work depending in the size of the storm. For me, the idea of a basic income is also a sort of an "ark". But I've tried others -- like helping people be more self-reliant with growing stuff via the garden simulator or helping people with making stuff with OSCOMAK (not to say how successful I've been, which is not much, especially for OSCOMAK, pretty much a big nothing except others are doing related ideas now in a smaller way like Thingiverse or Appropedia).

I agree there is a tension of where to invest your time and other resources. You have to find something that works for you and your unique interests and abilities. It;s true though that when you invest in yourself, or your family, or even your local neighborhood, you have a much better sense of whether the investment is paying off than doing general advocacy for something to contribute to global change. As I say on my site when I talk about five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned and theft): "The particular balance a society adopts is going to reflect the unique blend of history, culture, infrastructure, environment, relationships, mythologies, religions, and politics of that society." I guess the same goes for individuals and families, too?

Anyway, I had my kid around age 40. I've come to learn that being an older parent has its pros and cons. My dad had me around age 50 though. So, good luck if you want kids!!!

And don't let worries about the future stop you, or no one would have kids, since even for billionaires, money can come and go. Example (and kind of makes your point about techies vs. legal sharks, plus mine about a basic income to support inventors):
"Goldman Sachs Not Liable for Failed $580 Million Deal"
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
"Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) defeated a $580 million negligence suit over its role as adviser to speech- recognition pioneer Dragon Systems Inc. in a doomed merger, one of its biggest victories in a string of claims by dissatisfied clients since the financial crisis.A federal jury in Boston yesterday rejected the claims of Dragonâ(TM)s founders Jim and Janet Baker and two other shareholders that Goldman Sachs failed to properly vet Belgium-based Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products NV. The all-stock deal in June 2000 was rendered worthless months later when the fraud at Lernout & Hauspie was exposed and the company filed for bankruptcy. The verdict relieves Goldman Sachs of responsibility for a sale that left its clients with worthless shares in a failed company. The four Dragon founders sold some Lernout & Hauspie shares for $11 million before the stock collapsed and the Bakers lost the technology they spent decades developing."

I met Janet once at a trade show and she and her husband were also students of my college adviser They lost about most of their wealth, but worse, they lost access to all the Dragon speech recognition source code that was in some sense their "baby".

We all have our personal choices to make. And they are often hard ones. A book I just ordered:
"In Good Company: The Fast Track from the Corporate World to Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience"
http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...
"From the Wharton Business School and a secure place in corporate America to a $35-a-month allowance and the insecurity of a life of faith. This may seem a precautionary tale of downward secular mobility, but as we follow James Martin through his life and Jesuit training, we find it is all about ascent -- to God and to true happiness. (Paul Wilkes, Author of In Due Season: A Catholic Life, and The Seven Secrets of Successful Catholics)"

Not saying one has to be that extreme or that formally religious. Just something to reflect on. And it is not clear how "insecure" a life within the Catholic Church clergy is, so that write up may mislead? In any case, it show the potential for radical ("to the root") change at any age...

"most of us in the industrialized world have a driving license and can drive, but track and bus drivers are still professionals with special license. The question is - do you want to be a track driver?"

Very good analogy. Thanks! (Typos fixed, sorry)

I feel that the world needs more people who understand computing and information management, but we probably already have perhaps 10X-100X more professional programmers than we need -- mostly making work for each other with slightly different proprietary (or even free) versions of essentially the same thing but with different bugs.

Agriculture used to employ 90%of US workers 200 years ago, and now it employs about 2% Manufacturing is also on its way down. Yet, gardening is the most popular outdoor recreational hobby, and the Maker movement is rapidly growing. People like making and growing things -- often they like that more when they are not forced to do it endlessly in a boring or stressful way due to economic necessity.

Programming may well go the same way more towards a hobby. It already is in various areas. For example, a dozen years ago, everyone was writing web frameworks or ecommerce frameworks, and now there are so many off-the-shelf ones, only hobbyists or researchers are focusing on that (mostly, always rare exceptions). As we get more free software piling up, how many jobs do we really need writing more? The jobs become more "software archaeologist" or "software chooser" or "software customizer" if even any of that depending on how far standards have spread -- so similar to your point between daily drivers versus specialized drivers.

To build on your car analogy -- there is also a difference between car drivers, gas station attendants, car sales people, car mechanics, car delivery people, car rental agents, drivers ed teachers, gasoline refinery workers, and car designers. All are involved with cars, but in very different ways. There are right now very few car designer jobs compared to all the others. One hundred years ago though, 100s of small companies were designing cars, and with fewer drivers the ratio of designers to drivers was much higher. Although this analogy maybe breaks down because in theory software may need less maintenance once the software ecosystem settles down and also software may eventually maintain itself as AIs.

http://www.basicincome.org/bie...

Not because my kid is a dummy (far from it), but because I know becoming and staying an "owner" in the 1% is like winning the lottery. And societies with big rich/poor divides are less happy to live in -- even for the 1%.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08...
"Stiglitz and his allies argue that a free and competitive market is highly beneficial to society at large, but that it needs government regulation and oversight to remain functional. Without constraint, dominant interests use their leverage to make gains at the expense of the majority. Concentration of power in private hands, Stiglitz believes, can be just as damaging to the functioning of markets as excessive regulation and political control. "

See also on how aspiring millionaires are used to keep everyone down:
"The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's"
http://conceptualguerilla.com/...
"But here's something I'll bet the dittoheads haven't thought of. Maybe they're the chumps. Maybe they've been sold a bogus "American dream" that never existed. Maybe "the rules" they play by were written by the people who have "made it" -- not by the people who haven't. And maybe -- just maybe-- the people who have "made it" wrote those rules to keep the wannabes chasing a dream that's a mirage."

I wrote an essay on why even rich people should support a basic income:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi...

The fact is, most paid jobs are going away as robots and AIs become cheaper to employ than humans for more and more jobs -- even "creative" ones, like I discuss here
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyo...

Preparing your kid to win the 20th century economic rat race leaves him or her a rat on a sinking economic ship in a 21st century economy...

That said, independence when needed, cooperation when needed, hard work, prudence, saving, frugality, investing in the future -- in broad sense, these are all good things to learn however a kid applies them later in life.

On code, the free code and content I write now and in the past like our free garden simulator and other tools has helped (a teeny tiny bit, I hope) to help bring about a 21st century transformation to a bigger gift economy, to better planning, to a more informed and enlightened and empowered citizenry. For example, this freely usable software someone else lets me reformat my slashdot posts to remove smart quotes from quotations in the above that display wrong:
http://dan.hersam.com/tools/sm...

So, free code and free content can make a difference in the world by making the world a better place in various ways. And then, such a society can hopefully do a better job of taking care of old farts like I will be soon enough -- if I am not already. :-) As well as doing a better job of taking care of the next generation which is much more important than taking care of the previous generation -- although you would not know that looking at who gets "Social Security" and Medicare in the USA -- the old, not the young). As Daniel Moynihan said, "the young don't vote, and it shows".

Kids grow so fast. Enjoy them while you can! See also:
http://www.katsandogz.com/onch...
----
        On Children
          Kahlil Gibran

        Your children are not your children.
        They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
        They come through you but not from you,
        And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

        You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
        For they have their own thoughts.
        You may house their bodies but not their souls,
        For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
        which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
        You may strive to be like them,
        but seek not to make them like you.
        For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

        You are the bows from which your children
        as living arrows are sent forth.
        The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
        and He bends you with His might
        that His arrows may go swift and far.
        Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
        For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
        so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Mod parent up. Not sure if this New Yorker cartoon from the most recent issue will stay around long, but I saw it this morning and it sums up how I feel about much of computer software development the last thirty years since Smalltalk:
http://www.newyorker.com/image...

A character says "The new house is almost ready!" and it looks exactly the same as the rundown house in almost exactly the same location.

Software could be better, like the character could in theory have built a better house. But in practice, watching this play out of 30 years myself, much of what we get is just re-re-re-inventing the wheel. And there is a terrible waste in having to re-learning it slightly differently with slightly different bugs and limits, and little true progress. Often there is regress, since Smalltalk's keyword syntax is still more readable and expandable than C-like syntax.

Where would we be now if a truly free Smalltalk had had all the billions poured into it that Java had due to IBM and Sun's marketing clout and all the effort that has gone into JavaScript dues to Netscape/Mozilla/Google/etc.? Including the best of any LightTable ideas (a view with source when you hover over a name in code is indeed cool) and any other GUI improvements? As well as better libraries and better cross-platform support and better browser integration and so on?

Still, maybe JavaScript is the best we could hope for at this point, and better than we deserve, as someone else said and I echo in this submission from yesterday about James Mickens' last "USENIX "login" column explaining all that is wrong with the Web pages technically:
http://slashdot.org/submission...
Citing: https://www.usenix.org/system/...

But we got that mess for social reasons (competition, centralization, monetarization), not technical one, like I mention here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Social stuff like ParcPlace not being willing to license ObjectWorks/VisualWorks cheaply to Sun when they wanted to do a set top project (which ultimately lead to sun making Java).

Could Smalltalk be improved? Yes. Even the syntax could, like by using more C-like strings and comments while keeping the keywords. Could it benefit from type annotations for optimization? Probably yes too. And could it benefit from being built from textual sources instead of an image (like GNU smalltalk). Again yes. But investments in that direction would have produced so much more benefits than something like Java or JavaScript.

That said, after all the pain and suffering and waste, Java and JavaScript/HTML5/CSS3 have finally become half-way decent platforms. I'm moving more in a JavaScript direction myself for mostly social and practical reasons, despite knowing how great Smalltalk was and seeing how much it could have become. I talk about that on Slashdot here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://developers.slashdot.org...

Smalltalk might still get there building on Java and JavaScript as with these projects:
http://amber-lang.net/
http://www.redline.st/

Mickens' comments are mostly true, but end up being tradeoffs for ubiquity and easy installs in the case of JavaScript -- even Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls agreed on that with their efforts toward the Lively Kernel driven by the fact they could not get many people to install Squeak or Squeak-based apps).
http://www.lively-kernel.org/

http://mobile.slashdot.org/sto...

That reference is to link this to a broader discussion. It's true the $30 Kyocera Hydro phone from Amazon is only for Boost Mobile -- but you don't need to activate it or sign a contract to buy it. If you use it as WiFi only, that is all you pay. One of the first apps we installed was a work in progress for disaster relief agencies and others called Serval Mesh which does direct phone-to-phone WiFi.
http://www.servalproject.org/
"Simply put, Serval is a telecommunications system comprised of at least two mobile phones that are able to work outside of regular mobile phone tower range due thanks to the Serval App and Serval Mesh. "

So, I think the low US$30 cost for the Hydro from Amazon shows what is possible. And that new Slashdot article sounds like an exploration of it. This is a broad trend related to Moore's law that I (and many others) have been talking about for years.

More by me on that from 2000:
"[unrev-II] Singularity in twenty to forty years?"
http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...
" Commtech -- Twenty years to ubiquitous cheap wireless communications
    Source: This is already happening now with cell phones, but needs time to percolate throughout the world. "

Or more recently from 2008:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post...
"Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a "post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg?"

I suggest in that one that the current cost of Princeton University hoarding its endowment is that it could have bought $100 OLPC-like computers for a couple hundred million poor families (assume five people each, for the bottom billion) in the world to give them access to education via the internet (like via Khan Academy). Or you could now buy Hydro phones for a the bottom billion families and pre-load them with WIkipeida. That shows how much the socio-economic landscape revolving around knowledge and privilege has changed given the playing out of Moore's law.

So, with or without Firefox OS, these trends are happening. What is frustrating about this is to see what is possible materially, but then see out socio-economic processes shaping that into something so much less than it could be (by increasing the rich-poor divide by always choosing the design that better supports central control with a gatekeeper who can monetize it). But that is also why it is so frustrating to see Mozilla with an idealistically better mission get a billion dollars recently and then so far have so little to show for it (other than a "me too" version of Android and WebOS) -- while also letting innovation in Thunderbird and Firefox seemingly grind to a halt.

As others have said, if you want to free Android users, you need to make a good suite of free apps and services, and even that is not enough because the phone carriers control the lowest layer of connection. Firefox OS by itself does not solve that problem. And it still leaves Android users locked up -- and if the Western world remains locked up, that is likely to spill over to the rest of the world. And we are going to get dirt cheap phones soon in any case. So, I still feel there was a missed opportunity here -- even as I can wish Firefox OS the best luck in the world.

http://soylentnews.org/comment...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://www.damninteresting.com...
"Furthermore, both radiotherapy and chemotherapy have an immune-suppressing side-effect. Since both treatments kill the rapidly dividing cells of the immune system along with the rapidly dividing cancer cells, both can be used together if care is taken. But immune-stimulating Coley's Toxins work entirely differently, and their effect would be cancelled out if used at the same time as high-dose immunosuppressant chemo- or radiotherapy. It became an either/or situation-- and in the end, the fashionable new treatments won out over Coleyâ(TM)s fiddly reworking of an ancient 'natural' remedy. "

Some other suggestions by me here (primarily nutritional, but also on fasting helping with chemotherapy):
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

More on mushrooms and preventing cancer as also mentioned:
http://articles.mercola.com/si...

It is hard to know who to trust in the cancer industry to find, as you suggest, the best individualized treatment. It's certainly true that people selling alternative products and books (including Furhman, mentioned in my other post) have a conflict of interest. In general, the entire field of oncology is also sadly full of conflict of interest because oncologists make so much money by doing treatments.
https://www.burtongoldberg.com...
"Here is a shocking fact you most likely did not know: Unlike other kinds of doctors, cancer doctors (oncologists) are allowed to profit from the sale of chemotherapy drugs. In fact, most of the annual income oncologists earn comes from the profit that they make from selling these highly toxic drugs to their patients."

And:
http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/20...
"And that is where oncologic decision making gets really messy. Because in the United States, at least, many oncologists make a good deal of their income selling drugs to their patients. ... Many oncologists vehemently deny being influenced by this financial conflict of interest. But such denials defy both logic and data. Oncologists would have to be superhuman not to be influenced, at least unconsciously, by such strong incentives. After all, there is often no single "best" way to treat any given tumor, and there's often good reason to believe that expensive new therapies might be better than older, cheaper treatments. In the face of such uncertainty, how could oncologists avoid being influenced by the knowledge that those promising expensive new treatments also help generate so much income?"

Integrative alternatives:
http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/PA...

Regardless of the future, I wish you the best in making the most of each day like this celebrity with cancer:
http://www.reuters.com/article...
http://www.people.com/people/a...
"Resolved to face her last days with courage and humor, "I don't think of dying," says the actress, 73, who previously battled lung cancer in 2009. "I think of being here now.""

Good luck!

http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?"

That said, sure, I've always likes Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics. He explores how they work and how they don't work. Asimov came from strong Jewish religious tradition, and it seems to me likely aspects of religion influenced his thoughts on them. A big part of religion is about how we interact with other people to be in community with them. So, to some extent, what the Navy is asking for is religious robots. See also Albert Einstein on "Religion and Science" and how science tells us nothing about how things *should* be,

Intelligent robots will probably eventually gain human rights, like in "The Bicentennial Man" by Isaac Asimov.

And as in my first point, an ethical and intelligent robot might ask, "Is War a Racket"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

A big reason for keeping humans in the loop is in theory their veto power when things get too far out of hand. However, science and technology has gotten ever better at shaping humans into killing machines for their own kinds, sadly, if you even just look at how many more soldiers fire their guns in combat now than 100 years ago,

So yes, let us build Gandhi-bots! :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

And let's have them act as nannies to a new generation of more ethical humans like James P. Hogan wrote about: :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...
http://p2pfoundation.net/Voyag...
"What they liked there, apparently, was the updated "Ghandiesque" formula on how bring down an oppressive regime when it's got all the guns. And a couple of years later, they were all doing it!"

Anyway, even if it misses the big picture about post-scarcity as in my sig, this sounds like one of the more worthwhile things the Navy has spent money on recently.

"Eat For Health - The Anti-Cancer Diet" https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...

Especially mushrooms as discussed there...

Also look into iodine, vitamin D, and exercise (including to keep the lymph moving so it can do its job). And good sleep and various ways to relax (friends, music, laughter, nature walks, pets,etc.-- see Andrew Weil and also Blue Zones) and put the nervous system in a health-promoting state of mind as far as controlling the immune system.

And also avoiding toxins/radiation in food and the environment (including consumer products).

We need to learn about the role of some compounds or organisms found in moldy fruit and pond water (and mushrooms, as above, and also various herbs) that may also help the body deal with cancer. Our too clean environments may have their costs, since our bodies are adapted to live in a certain context of threats and opportunities.

Fasting can also sometimes help prevent cancer, since the body can selectively get rid of problematical cells first. Fasting also makes chemotherapy less bad because normal cells go into a sort of resting phase during fasting whereas the cancer cells keep growing and are more exposed to the chemotherapy toxins (not that the benefits of most chemotherapy seem worth the costs from what I read -- although some treatments may be worth it).

People are always getting cancerous cells, and most times their immune systems get rid of them. We nee do do what we can to boost the immune system (nutrition etc.) and also reduce the frequency of cells going rogue (toxins).

That said, sure it would be good to have better treatments for when people's immune systems fail to regulate their cancer cells. As you said, it is heart breaking to watch such a progression. And as Dr. Fuhrman says, once cancer is detected as a macro scale, it is iffy to get rid of if by means known today in most cases. So yes, better magic bullets would be great. But what we can do right now is try to minimize the need for magic bullets.

My guess as to why this measles treatment works is that cancer cells have shifted so much of their cellular pathways to replication that they are unable to defend at all against the measles virus, compared to other cells. This probably either causes them to self-destruct or tags them in some way that triggers the immune system. This effect is probably not specific to the measles virus but may well apply to any of many broad classes of virus.

Good luck with your career. Maybe someday something like this will take off (my proposal for better software for medical sensemaking):
https://www.newschallenge.org/...
http://www.changemakers.com/di...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

And similar specs. The waterproof Kyocera Hydro is US$29.64 right now with free Prime shipping on Amazon for the Kyocera (carrier locked though, but WiFi works fine; unfortunately not sunlight readable though) versus US$99.00 (and free shipping) for the ZTE Open C. The Hydro is three times cheaper than the Firefox OS device. The ZTE Open C has slightly better hardware specs though and is not locked to a carrier given the SIM card slots.
http://www.amazon.com/Kyocera-...
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/...

So I guess I don't see where there are any cost of hardware advantages to this first offering with Firefox OS. Maybe there will be more to come? It's true you can only run that Kyocera on Boost Mobile, but WiFi works fine even without a plan. I don't know if that phone is carrier subsidized to any degree. I bought three Hydros (one a bit better) for developer testing for writing networked Android apps. I've paid for a few days of phone service for one of them mostly as a test; I have no plans on activating the other two as phones. I doubt those are subsidized much if at all, but I have no proof of that other than the fact than anyone can buy them and just use them as WiFi only devices.

I see multiple unlocked Android phones on Amazon for about US$100:
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sel...

Anyway, just thought more about your point on cost... Firefox OS is currently more expensive than low-end Android. So the (one billion Mozilla/Google US dollars later) question is, how fast will that change?

Even if Firefox OS was better than Android (still to be seen other than for privacy), it would still face the same uphill adoption of, say, FireWire/Thunderbolt vs. USB1/2/3.

Also for development/testing/networking purposes I bought a ~$120 Android OLPC XO tablet that comes pre-loaded with educational software:
http://www.amazon.com/XO-7-inc...

In a few years, those prices will continue to fall. It's much more pleasant to browse the web on that Android tablet than on an Android phone. I'm not convinced a Firefox OS tablet is going to beat that price anytime soon -- even if it might have privacy benefits.

Thanks for the reply to this and my other in this thread. Yes, "supposed" was intentional. :-) My point about Google's service offerings and Android was not to express a preference, just to point out why Google's Android had an edge in adoption. I'd rather use services that spy/track/advertise less, even if you still have to assume for prudence that all communications are logged and decryptable.

And for my other comment and your reply, I read on Glassdoor a lot of people inside Mozilla are unhappy with the current direction anyway, so agreeing with them could have been a plus, who knows. :-)
http://www.glassdoor.com/Revie...
"Con: "And if you work in Firefox OS expect no understanding of what's happening and when" in 3 reviews"
And: "Most of the org is in service to Firefox OS - this is necessary given the company's direction, but sucks resources from other projects." And: "They're now spending $100m/yr on developers. It's very hard to see what that's achieving. Seems as if top talent is wasting its time there compared to what's being achieved at Google, Apple and others. One reason is massive technical debt and an insane codebase."

To respond to your points on cost and underserved markets, it sounds like you know a lot about Mozilla. I won't disagree that their strategy is plausible. However, I've seen a similar approach not work our well for the OLPC as an entire new software ecosystem, so I remain skeptical. If even Microsoft can't succeed in the smart phone market, is Mozilla likely to?

Here were some comments I wrote about five years ago on the OLPC project as a software developer who participated in the Give-One-Get-One program (getting two and giving two):
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
"Imagine, Google and Verizon could even make a promise now to customers -- buy your Droid through Verizon, and in two years, if you continue your cell phone plan, we will give you the latest Droid version and if you return the old one to a Verizon store, we'll send it to materially poor kids loaded with educational software that teaches them how to read, write, and do math. And with bluetooth, and WiFi, the Droid could even have some software that works along the lines that Sugar aspired to do, with kids collaborating together. What a deal -- and it might greatly boost current sales. :-) Maybe someone should forward this note to someone they know at Google or Verizon? :-) Seriously, what US teacher would not buy a Droid over an iPhone knowing it was going to teach some poor kid to read in two years? (Of course, Apple might eventually have to follow suit. :-) And that gives me and the rest of the free software developer world two years to write all that free software for those kids. :-) "

As I suggest there, hand-me-down phones (perhaps with new batteries) may well be much cheaper than anything else for emerging markets. And those phones run Android plus some other OSes. I also think it unlikely Firefox will meet any special low-power goals or cost goals that Android phones would not meet. Most apps are not that performance critical so Java on Android is good enough, and Java will probably be more power efficient than JavaScript in Firefox OS. So where is the power savings or other costs savings really going to come from? I like ideas like "Design For The Other 90%", but it is still hard to beat a free Android phone given Moore's law and continued falling prices. The Kyocera Hydro is now US$30 on Amazon. It is better than probably any Android phone from 2009 when I wrote the above -- especially the G1 Android Phone I got as an Android developer which dies eight months later. In another couple years that same Hydro phone might be US$20 or less in the USA. And it would probably be already much cheaper now if purchased in bulk by a nation. Is it really worth it to people in other countries, even materially poor ones, to try to use some whole new *unproven* OS with next-to-no apps to save some money on a phone? Again, if money matters, it is hard to beat cheap recycled hand-me-downs. And if pride/status matters, which it does, Android will still be popular because it is popular elsewhere. If number of free apps matter, again Android wins.

For me, as an analogy, it just did not seem worth it to make Sugar-specific apps for the OLPC when I could work towards general stuff (like in HTML/JavaScript or Android/Java) that a thousand times more people could use. Still, Firefox has long had a much bigger user base than Sugar ever had, so the comparison is not exact.

Developers only have so much time and attention. Just ask Microsoft whose phone platform does not have many apps. Unless you can get people in developing markets to do the programming themselves, which is not unreasonable at least for paid apps, you have to expect most apps will be made first for Western markets and for Android and the major browsers as web apps or extensions.

Still, maybe that will all change with Firefox OS. I can hope so. But as with my bug report, I am trying (and so far failing) to get Mozilla Firefox to support local applications well. Mozilla claims privacy is a top priority, but has seemingly failed to emphasize local apps as well as Google Chrome has (granted, Chrome achieves that by not restricting security for local apps as much as Mozilla, but as in the bug report, Mozilla goes too far the other way to make local web pages with different query strings be different security domains if launched from bookmarks). Being able to run local apps well is maybe one of the best ways of ensuring internet privacy. I was glad to see local apps mentioned in that job posting, which I found especially attractive about it, so we can be hopeful that local apps issue will be eventually addressed if by someone else. Having spent the past about 2.5 years supporting a huge C++/Tcl codebase burdened with technical debt (and a Java derivative I've helped port), I guess I can feel a bit relieved the underlying Mozilla C++ codebase which sounds and looks equally big and burdened will remain someone else's problem and I can just build on top of it -- to put a happy face on a sadly missed opportunity to do a lot of good.

Sill, WebOS (previously from HP/Palm) is already out there for years and is moving into the TV market. So there is more fragmentation there for developers. Given WebOS is open source and powered by HTML and JavaScript, why did Mozilla not pick up WebOS and improve it and/or add XUL support to it to consolidate the industry instead of fragment it more?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
https://developer.palm.com/con...

It also seems to me that if Mozilla really cared about booting to the web they would do things like support custom builds of ChromeOS with Firefox that I could easily install on my Chromebook. :-)

When I think what a billion dollars over the past few years could have bought in terms of free software for the world, somehow I remain unimpressed by what Mozilla has delivered recently (including falling market share, sadly) -- the same as in that Glassdoor comment cited above. Again, I hope I am proven completely wrong in this and am forced to eat my words in a couple of years and acknowledge a huge success of Firefox OS and related efforts. I wish I could have said the same about Sugar and OLPC, which I can still, to be positive, credit with in-a-sense providing a proof of concept for the Samsung Chromebook I write this on. Even if I predicted the $100 laptop too in 2000 in this post: :-)
http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...

We'll see. But I really hope Mozilla after FIrefox OS is established (or not), that Mozilla can get back to improving Thunderbird and Firefox as apps, and hopefully in unexpectedly magnificent ways that provide leadership for the web.

From a law firm (biased, perhaps): http://consumerjusticegroup.co...
"Workers at IBM and at other microchip fabs, or "fabrication plants," are exposed to benzene and other toxic carcinogens that can cause birth defects, leukemia, and other serious, debilitating medical conditions. While "bunny suits" prevent dust, hair, and skin cells from coming into contact with microchips, too often not enough is done in microchip factories to prevent the person inside the suit from breathing dangerous cancer-causing chemicals like benzene and formaldehyde while at the workplace. Since 2000, IBM has faced lawsuits from more than 250 former microchip plant employees. And since 2000, IBM has worked to suppress scientific findings showing the increase of cancer incidences in their microchip plant workers."

And also:
"Life In The Plume: IBM's Pollution Haunts a Village"
http://www.syracuse.com/specia...
"But for much of its history, Big Blue routinely polluted its birthplace. Tons of industrial solvents used to clean computer parts were dumped down drains or leached from leaky pipes into the ground for years before environmental rules required that such "spills" be reported. In 2002, scientists discovered the ground was exacting its revenge: The large underground chemical plume was releasing gases into homes and offices in a 350-acre swath south of the plant. The main chemical was a liquid cleaning agent called trichloroethylene, or TCE, that has been linked to cancer and other illnesses. IBM took responsibility and launched a multimillion-dollar cleanup. At the same time, the company announced plans to sell the plant and to ship many jobs overseas. ... "We found out that IBM had two faces in this community," said Matt LaTessa, a barber whose shop is on Monroe Street in The Plume. "One was a nice face, beautiful, big buildings and a lot of jobs. But underneath they were rotten. They were poisoning us." ..."

Versus:

"MD Anderson Taps IBM Watson to Power "Moon Shots" Mission Aimed at Ending Cancer, Starting with Leukemia"
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us...
"MD Anderson's Oncology Expert Advisor powered by IBM Watson is designed to integrate the knowledge of MD Anderson's clinicians and researchers, and to advance the cancer center's goal of treating patients with the most effective, safe and evidence-based standard of care available. Starting with the fight against Leukemia, MD Anderson's Oncology Expert Advisor is expected to help MD Anderson clinicians develop, observe and fine-tune treatment plans for patients, while helping them recognize adverse events that may occur throughout the care continuum. The cognitive-powered technology is also expected to help researchers advance novel discoveries."

Although, consider:
"Eat For Health - The Anti-Cancer Diet"
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...

Also Vitamin D and iodine can help prevent cancer...

When I worked at IBM Watson as a software developer, part of that time my workstation was put in windowless old labs that has been used for who knows what... To his credit, my supervisor tried really hard to make sure the second lab had been fully renovated...

Someone from Switzerland who saw other windowless offices at Watson said all that would be illegal in Switzerland, to have people working in windowless rooms... Not sure what the Swiss lawas are on chemical exposure... Back then was when I thought a lot about how all fabs and related labs should be 100% roboticized on the production floor. Bunny suits in that sense are such a quaint 20th century idea...

... if I looked up my old slashdot postings from then talking about Gatto and Holt and homeschooling and unschooling.

You wrote: "the entire job of a teacher, particularly a K-8 teacher, is to evaluate students and set good progression goals for that student. ..."

Fairly accurate, but interesting you did not mention activities like communicating information or values in that... Or who sets the "goals" or what they actually are. As John Taylor Gatto says, the problem with most US schools is they are working as designed (originally in Prussia to deliver obedient cannon-fodder soldiers, obedient factory workers, and obedient citizens). So, if you give schools more money, they will only do that job better!

See:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/sc...
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
http://www.the-open-boat.com/G...
https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? ... Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there. ..."

That said, investments in groups like Khan Academy seem worthwhile... One of the few really good Gates Foundation investments perhaps...
https://www.khanacademy.org/
http://www.gatesfoundation.org...

The Broad Foundation is making the exact same mistake as Zuckerberg...
http://www.broadcenter.org/

An alternative by me:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towa...
"New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities. Like straightforward ideas such as Medicare-for-all, this is an easy solution to state, likely with broad popular support, but it may be a hard thing to get done politically for all sorts of reasons. ..."