where on earth did you get the impression that india was an advanced industrial civilisation thousands of years ago? have you read any of the legends - the mahabarata and so on? it was *backwards*! only the people in power had the kinds of unlimited wealth similar to governments and large corporations of today. and - as now - they keep things incredibly secret. the advantage that they had then over today is the total lack of communication. the people in power at the time were so far removed in terms of wealth and knowledge and resources that they were commonly viewed - quite literally - as living gods.

so no, there *was* no advanced industrial civilisation in india. there were a few incredibly wealthy powerful people with access to machines, scared of letting the knowledge out of their hands of how those machines worked in case their enemies got hold of them (a situation not dissimilar to today...) and then there was everyone else, eking out medieval-style subsistence existence.

thinking that through, there could be a series of compounded reasons why not, and we can summarise at the end with an analogy.

firstly, the people who _did_ make these flying machines were the ruling class of india at the time. they had reputations as "living gods" (how if they could quotes fly quotes would the ordinary person believe otherwise?). in other words, they were incredibly wealthy. so they had access to thousands or tens of thousands of workers if they needed them, to go out and find the metals and other resources.

secondly, fast-forwarding to our "modern" times, we have some texts - written in the context of science at the time - which are in sanskrit, and the context is lost. it takes a *lot* of research to work out the missing information that the original authors would have known. the classic funny story here is that the bible was written in hebrew and was translated to greek by someone who didn't *actually* understand the idiomatic hebrew of the time. so he made some hilarious "literal" translations - the eye of the needle is the most well-known one but there are many others that two famous religious scholars collaborated together to uncover, on the basis that neither of them tried to convert the other away from their respective religions :)

thirdly, we have the "cranks and myths and conspiracy" brigade who like to make a hell of a lot of noise, increasing the probability that even rational people will steer clear of the entire area, *especially* if they are in a quotes renowned quotes scientific established career.

lastly, that analogy. imagine that we are talking about... say... fighter jets, not ancient flying vehicles. let's imagine that you've _heard_ about fighter jets (never seen one). you might have access to the internet, but you've never seen a "fighter jet" go over your head, making an enormous amount of noise. but you heard on the internet that they exist. in the context of a remote country, isolated from the rest of the world, ask yourself the question "why hasn't anyone in *our* country built one of these fighter jets?".

and that really helps hammer it home, that these projects are *expensive*.... even if people believe they are practical (not a complete fabrication, at all, thanks to the cranks, in the first place). i went through the list of materials (the metallurgy section): there are *sixty* types of alloys that need to be made!

so, yeah, i can fully understand why it hasn't been done in today's modern society.

honestly i have no idea if they had primitive glider-type planes: the surviving sanskrit texts don't describe such.

i didn't say "proof", i effectively said "*after* reading the sanskrit documents (or their available translations), make a judgement for yourself". about what you've written: think about this - how, in a country where there is no internet, no telephones, no long-distance communication of *any* kind, would there be any kind of "backup" record? we're lucky that even the vimanas documents survived.

cast your mind back thousands of years. most people you know - most people you've *ever* known - are subsistence farmers. the stories you hear - which became legend - are of the "gods" battling in flying chariots. pretty incredible, huh? and yet there are people who come back from battles who tell you these amazing tales... ... how many of those people would have writing skills? or know about electricity? (or even care)

now compare that situation to today. do you know about electricity? do you know about something called "chemistry"? of course you do, and you have something called "the internet" where you could even teach yourself about those things. ... but the people in power at the time? they would have had extraordinary wealth, and extraordinary power. they would have had scholars, and engineers and much more - and the important thing is that in order to keep the knowledge they learned from falling into the hands of their enemies, they would have kept that knowledge *secret*, wouldn't they? and that would be easy to do: have a bunch of guys with great memories whom you keep an eye on (you can always kill them if you get attacked, whereas books could be stolen).

so it is not too hard to imagine that:

a) there could be secretive development of scientific knowledge
b) that knowledge could be kept from everyone outside of the immediate power base
c) that it would be so unbelievably far advanced from the rest of the society that they would consider it to be "magic", and the people controlling it to be "gods".

does that make any sense? and is there anything unreasonable or irrational about either a, b or c, given what we know about the history of india around that era?

now, regarding the "interpretation" comment: again, i can only say read the texts yourself. make the interpretation yourself". if you don't have time to do that, and are still interested, find someone that you trust who has.

one thing i did find fascinating about that link i sent: the sanskrit texts apparently describe pilot clothing and diet! the clothing is designed to be fire-proof as well as extremely warm, and the recommended diet is five (!) meals a day. the texts also describe knowledge of different layers to our atmosphere (five are given names). the author of the analysis at the link i sent says that he had asked an airforce pilot to review the text, and he mentions that it is well-known amongst pilots - especially combat ones - that the physical toll of combat aircraft is extremely high. modern medical professionals therefore recommend that combat pilots eat small very frequent meals,. it is also a taboo in military airforce circles to fly on an empty stomach.

question. how would they know this? a simple "glider" in no way puts its pilot through signifncant physical stress. gliders simply do not reach the required altitude. and how would they know that there are different regions to our atmosphere unless someone had actually been up there?

*think* - please, for goodness sake.

here is an english translation of the papers: http://www.bibliotecapleyades....

random moderators: BEFORE considering hitting "-1" please read the full text below.

if you look up the papers they apparently had mercury-based plasma ion drives (which i hear NASA and the JPL have been researching for some time) as well as highly destructuve beam weapons (which i hope *nobody* in modern times has been researching). the papers are thousands of years old, and have been well-known for a considerable amount of time, mostly for the metallurgy as the papers go through absolutely every single detail required, from sourcing the materials to creating the crucibles and kilns, to making the garments needed to deal with altitude. there's a story on the internet that someone in india, during victorian times, actually recreated one of these machines, directly from the instructions. when the british heard about it they had it destroyed.

doing a quick google search.... yes, this is the vedic "vimanas" being presented at this conference: it's actually nothing "new", it's just that peoples' reactions are... well, if one wants to put it charitably, it's just surrounded with an amazing amount of incredulity and disbelief, but if we are honest the better way to put it is that it is absolute pure arrogance to think that our current level of technology is the first and only peak of technological capability on the planet: it's just that we are far more connected now than we were before, so word of new discoveries tends to get around.

that "incredulity" you can counteract by simply reviewing the documents for yourself. i recommend focussing on the sections covering the science that *has* been re-discovered since the techniques were lost, for example the mining and metallurgy sections. once you have at least verified that these sections correspond precisely with modern techniques, is it so hard a stretch of one's mind to consider that the other sections and instructions might be correct as well?

pions are basically made up of quarks just like the neutron and the proton: there's nothing magical about it, and has absolutely nothing to do with gravitons (if such even exist except as a mathematical concept). the difference is that pions only contain two quarks (rather than three) and so they're not stable. imagine throwing two magnets into the air very very carefully and having them spin around each other for a very brief period of time. if they fly apart, splat no more particle: if they touch, splat no more particle. but for that incredibly short duration where the two quarks successfully spin around each other in close orbit, there you have a "pion".

wait... floppy disks are a particularly coarse-grained media, meaning that they are quite likely to survive (in storage) for a very long time. also, they don't contain silicon ICs. does anyone remember the great idea of SD Cards with built-in OSes and a WIFI antenna, and how those have been used as spyware tools? likewise USB sticks could have absolutely anything in them. so i don't think it's such a good idea for the whitehouse to move away from floppy disks.

blackberries on the other hand, i heard a story back in 2007 that the entire email infrastructure at the time ran off of *two* machines (two physical machines). one for the US, one for the rest of the world. i trust that the whitehouse email doesn't go through a single server. that would be... bad.

normally one would google that and it would come up with instances where people have installed GNU/Linux OSes on the specific hardware in question, and the older the hardware and the more popular it is, the larger the chance of finding someone else who has done exactly that and created a report (or five). unfortunately however, at this very moment, the search engine results show a huge number of interfering references to a site known as "slashdot", as well as RSS syndicated links to the same.

so you can either just risk it and try it, then get on one of the popular forums, or you can wait for things to calm down a bit and the google searches which include slashdot syndication of its front-page drop off the pagerank a bit (should take a couple of days).

that having been said: it looks like it's a standard laptop with an x86 chipset, so it should almost certainly boot. touchpanels tend to use all the same chipsets, and those have been supported in the linux kernel for some time due to GPL compliance, so you should be fine.

let's be clear about a couple of things. one: our vision is designed by natural evolution, and staring continuously at objects only 0.5 to 1 metre away is not part of nature's remit. two: our vision *does not* deteriorate with age, it deteriorates with *misuse* or more specifically *lack* of use: more specifically *lack of training*. eyes have *muscles*. fail to train those muscles and guess what happens?

there is a guy who decided he did not want to be enlisted in the vietnam draft, so two weeks prior to the eye exam he borrowed some glasses from a friend who had terrible vision. the deterioration in his vision as a result was so poor that he failed the eye exam, and so was ineligible for the draft.

now, afterwards, he reasoned that if it took only two weeks to turn his vision so disastrously badly wrong, it would, logically, be perfectly reasonable to attempt some eye exercises to get his formerly perfect vision back. the result: after some experimentation with some exercises, he got his perfect vision back.

now aged over 70 years old this person - who has written a book about the exercises that keep your eyes healthy - has twenty FORTY vision.

why am i mentioning this?

because aged 10 i was given prescription glasses. i had discovered computers a few years beforehand and had begun to spend significant hours in front of computers. every few years, as required and advised, i returned to the opticians. my eyes - EVERY TIME I RETURNED - were described to be "worse than before".

so aged 10 i had something like - 0.5 diopters, but by aged 36 i had -4.0 in one eye, -3.5 in the other and an astigmatism on top of that of -1. i spent $USD 1,000 on two pairs of glasses: one was +1 diopters less than the other. driving to holland, in the dark, i wore the "distance" glasses for 15 minutes and got such a massive headache from them that i had to wear the "reading" glasses.

so that was 2005. i realised that, after being told by opticians at the time "oh, people who are short-sighted are used to seeing perfectly at long distance so we give them an extra -0.25 just to help", that the problem was that i was being given glasses each and every single time that were too strong, but not only that, that i was having my vision "corrected" to distance, was then looking at objects only 0.5 to 1.0 metres away and my eyes were AUTOMATICALLY ADJUSTING.

at some point i then made the stupid mistake of getting a 24in iMac. huge wide screen, i thought it was fantastic. except that over the next three years using it, because i was sitting (unavoidably) close to it, my eyes trained themselves to deal with the wide angle... by going *prism*.

now when i look rapidly to the left or right at any object a distance further away than 2 metres, i CANNOT FOCUS ON IT. i see double for a good couple of seconds. in the dark, lights over two metres away i cannot bring into focus at all. however if the object is only 0.5 to 1 metre away, i am able to *really rapidly* flick my eyes backwards and forwards, focussing successfully within fractions of a second, absorbing the information on-screen.

in other words, guess what? my eyes *keep adjusting* to the conditions that i put them through.

now i have stopped getting prescription glasses entirely: i am absolutely fed up with the ignorant optician industry screwing up my vision. if i go to an optician, they think they know better and they damn well don't. they tell you that your eyes deteriorate with age, but that is absolute rubbish: the muscles around your eyes are just like any other muscle: they need *exercise*.

so that's what this old guy advocates: eye exercise. several times a day, stop what you are doing and look in the distance for 8 to 10 minutes. if you want to get rid of short-sightedness, pick two objects, one just at the edge of your "blurry" vision and one just inside it. look at the first, look at the second, look at the first, look at the second - focus on each as you do so. then, move the two objects (your thumbs will do) ever so slightly further away. repeat the exercise. very quickly you will get a *CONSCIOUS* feel for what it takes for your eye muscles to "focus" in the distance and, importantly, you are *exercising* those muscles, making them stronger. those muscles will become more capable, and you *will* be able to control them, just like any other muscle. i've done this successfully: it took a couple of weeks, and i had improved vision.

now i've also taken up tennis, and i go every day for around 20 minutes or more, even just to hit a ball against a wall. it's enough to teach me the importance of looking after my eyes, as i don't like seeing two balls coming towards me, because i can't hit either of them.

so, to our anonymous writer, i tell you this: DO NOT get progressive glasses, for goodness sake. i assume you are already taking breaks (to look after your wrists): please when you get up, go outside and look in the distance. if you don't want to walk, sit out on the porch or at the window, and look down the street if you don't have a garden. get a smaller higher-resolution screen: i now have a macbook pro (which i instantly destroyed the proprietary spyware-ridden OS on and replaced it with debian), and it has a 13in 2560x1900 LCD. i run the standard xterm font (around 9pt) and it is doing my eyes a hell of a lot of good, forcing them to focus *clearly*. i make my eye muscles *work*. i now look at other screens and i notice all the faults! in fact this only took 4 hours. and, importantly, with the screen width being smaller i am not forcing my eyes to different focal lengths quite as badly as that 24in widescreen.

if you absolutely must use 2 or more screens, *please* consider getting 1280x1024 (4:3 aspect ratio) or 1600x1200 or whatever, or if you do lots of programming run the 16:9 screens at 9:16 (sideways) - GNU/Linux OSes can do this perfectly well. make the screens form an arc rather than a straight line: no matter where you sit they should be directly head-on.

the basic critical point of all this: please *exercise* your eyes. don't trust any optician that is ignorant of this simple fact. you know you need to give all your *other* muscles a work-out rather than sitting there in a chair all day: why would those in your eyes be any different? and if you don't do that, then is it any surprise that the lenses in your eyes become "stiff" as well?

a standard gnu/linux distro like debian, when installed on that ARM11 device, can have CUPS installed on it with no difficulty: CUPS has absolutely nothing to do with ARM itself, especially if you get a proper printer that doesn't try anything stupid like ship proprietary drivers (.deb files) directly off their own web site. basically if you get an HP printer you'll be fine. i did get the absolute latest 3-in-1 printer from Curry's last month, and i did have to install hplip from source but that's because the printer required hplip 3.1.16 and the version of debian i had for a client only had 3.1.12 - however amazingly HP's ready-to-go compilation script walked through the process of installing the prerequisites and got it all done. kinda impressive.

anyway so printing is not a problem. you are then going to *not* get him a chromebook, you're going to replace the OS (as someone else suggested) or you are going to sell the chromebook on ebay and get him a 200 quid Lenovo B30-50 from Tesco's or ebuyer.com or something similar (a big 15in 1366x768 LCD - awesome) - then you're going to install Debian GNU/Linux on that, too. setting up 3G dongles is really easy: remember to install the usbmodeswitch package. there is plenty of advice out there on setting up 3G dongles - remember to look up and set the correct APN settings in wvdial.conf (or whatever you end up using)

then, to make sure that he can print remotely, you're going to install a VPN on both devices (i recommend openvpn however tinc would do just as well and is slightly easier to set up) - both the ARM11 print server and the laptop, and you're going to either use the server that you're already maintaining, or you're going to ask a friend if you can put a VPN on their server, *or* you're going to get *another* of those ARM11 devices and send it to these guys:

http://raspberrycolocation.com...

basically for $EUR 36 per year they will host you an ARM11 device on a 100mbit/sec link. the power requirements and size are so small that it's perfectly feasible.

so that's what you're going to do... or not. it's a lot of work to set up, but if those are the requirements (remote printing access) then that's what needs to be done. it's going to be costly, however, as both the ARM11 device and the portable device will *both* need 3G connectivity.

honestly i can thoroughly recommend going a different route, as follows:

* go to a local three networks store and buy a Huawei MIFI (3G+WIFI gateway) device
* go to Maplin's and get a "mobile" 2-port WIFI router. i looked one up that could be re-flashed with OpenWRT.
* once the firmware is re-flashed on the "mobile" 2-port WIFI router, change it to be a *CLIENT* of the Huawei MIFI device.
* also set up the WIFI router to "bridge" mode (between the WIFI and the 2 ports: make them all on the same LAN space)
* plug the ARM11 device into one of the 2 LAN ports.
* associate the laptop with the MIFI's WIFI network as well

now you have the ARM11 device set up as a printer on the same (bridged) LAN as the WIFI devices, including the MIFI and the laptop. if you have installed OpenWRT as i suggest then you can also install the OpenWRT openvpn package on it (or tinc), and you then have 24x7 access to the systems on the network, and can manage them remotely *including* logging in to the ARM11 device and clearing out any stuck print jobs without needing to drive N+ miles.

this is what i have set up for a client (in one form or another). with this above 2nd scenario you are _still_ not going to get a chromebook, you're going to get a laptop with debian installed that you can actually manage (including remotely). the difference is that it'll be easier for your father because it will be internal WIFI, not a dangling external USB 3G modem. wicd-client is much easier to comprehend, i find, than the 3G management programs for GNU/Linux. err, there's WIFI networks and errr, there's a place where you press "connect" and errr that's it.

also this 2nd scenario you won't need to get 2 3G dongles (one for the laptop and one for the ARM11 device). that's one less 3G contract/PAYG sim card. btw i strongly recommend three networks over any other network (if you are in the UK) because they can do contract-less PAYG SIMs that *DO NOT* expire after one month. unlike vodafone and everyone else, who steal your money after exactly 30 days regardless of whether you've accessed the network or not. in fact three networks even have one PAYG SIM that for 70 quid lasts an entire year and has 12gbytes on it. perfect for emergency backup internet access, but i used to use a PAYG three SIM as a *permanent* internet connection. i used to get 2mbits/sec or sometimes greater, and it cost me 25 quid a month for 15gbytes worth of data, which is actually less than what a BT line costs (if you didn't have one, which we didn't).

so. lots to think about! it's doable... but please don't get a chromebook (except to replace the OS). they're designed to lock you out as a means for *google* to manage everything. that's not what you want here.

you have two kinds of deployment situations: those that need to be in the field, and those that can remain back at a base (preferably outside of the country). i would question even the need for an army to *have* the second type of individual when they could just as easily have someone from e.g. the CIA or elsewhere be contracted in.

so that would leave the first group - hackers that could need to be deployed in the field. now, i don't know about you, but if i was an ordinary soldier, along-side someone who basically could not run 20 metres without getting out of breath, i would hardly have any respect for them. i would consider them to be a liability, unable to fend for themselves, and, much worse than that, such unfit individuals could potentially end up risking the lives of their fellow soldiers under combat situations.

and that's a real serious problem, right there. knowing that, i can say absolutely for sure that even aged 44 there is absolutely no way that i would wish to go into a warzone without the same kind of physical training that *all my peers* had been through. that training is *really* important. it's about letting *you* know what you can achieve, as well as the rest of your squad. everyone gets the same level of training, so that everyone knows that they can count on each other when it really matters.

and the US army *wants* to have hackers be ostracised, uncertain if they can get themselves out of physical danger, and be a risk to people around them. that sounds ... hmm, it sounds like a stereotypical hacker if i am absolutely honest! but having the US army make that even worse... hmmm...

If the game itself is open-source and written by an international body. Having Olympics based on a proprietary game would just be insane. Just as insane as saying that swimming is owned by a company.

... haaaa, veery interesting: wasn't there an article on slashdot very recently that said that yoga apparently is a better cardiovascular work-out than aerobic exercise? and wouldn't it be fascinating if yoga activated DNA in different [much more beneficial] ways from aerobic exercise. meditation [deep breathing included] is *also* a form of exercise. wouldn't it be fascinating to find that there are actual *real* physiological benefits - at the cellular level - to all this so-called "mumbo jumbo" spiritual guru "nonsense", and that it all had *real* measureable benefits that *really did* prolong your life?

" Drug companies cannot illegally prioritize profits over patients"

actually, it's not illegal, and in fact what the judge is doing is directly against the Articles of Incorporation of the Company. if this is something you're not familiar with, watch the first few minutes of the Documentary called "The Corporation" or read professor Yunus's book "Creating a World Without Poverty". basically it is a LEGAL REQUIREMENT that the Directors of Corporations enact - pathologically and absolutely - the Articles of Incorporation of a Company, otherwise they may either be faced with a vote by their shareholders to resign, or they may face jail time. ... and the Articles of Incorporation typically state that profit MUST be maximised to the absolute, total, complete, without fail absolute 100% top absolute top priority above all else WITHOUT fail.

so under the Articles of Incorporation of this Drug Company, saving lives is not a priority: making MONEY - the absolute maximum amount possible - is the absolute top priority.

so this judge's decision, therefore, was quite literally the only way by which those lives could be prioritised over and above the profits of the Corporation. you really should watch "The Documentary". its premise is that if a Corporation was a real person instead of a fictitous one, they give 10 reasons why that "person" would be locked up forever as pathologically and criminally insane. i no longer call Corporations "Corporations, i call them "Cancerations" because they pathologically consume all resources to further themselves with blatant disregard.

simple, really.