Expanding a bit from my previous post: Of course, interested kids will get their RPi going, and might end up making magic, just as many of us did with our 8-bit machines 25 years ago. However, the bar the OLPC set to itself was quite different — And might I say, much higher: To come up with a {product, system} that's made for kids. For all kids. To help them to learn about everything, not just about how to do I/O with a computer. An operating environment that's tailored to a constructuvist view of education, allowing them to (easily) understand what's going on in the programs — But even if they don't want to, give them a wide array of programs to hand-hold them through the whole educational process.

Not by far the same task. Both RPi and OLPC set on for extraordinary tasks. But their targets are very far from each other.

Cheap it is, granted. And yes, its inceptors do (try to) target it at the educational market. I have in fact spotted several RPi machines at my university. However, getting a RPi usable to be part of a general science project is quite far from trivial. Yes, given its easily accessible GPIO, it's close to ideal. But basic and high school teachers rarely know enough to get a RPi to boot, don't even mention to control or monitor outside events.

If you read it any less historically, the odds to what GP refer get lesser and lesser.

In Mexico, at least, shopping in the known ideologically-green stores is often much more expensive than in regular chain stores (i.e. Walmart and the like). I buy most of my fresh food in the street markets, and it is both quite cheaper than chain stores and of better quality (i.e. food lasts longer, there is a wide range of product qualities on different price points for each produce, etc.)

Now, there are *some* producer-direct organic outlets which are quite cheap, and with great quality... But of course, it's not so easy to get to them (they are often in the countryside, for obvious reasons, and my city is quite big for me to leave it every week or two).

And Chileans do know at least a bit of chilli (unlike their Argentinian neighbours). But barely enough. Their food is thankfully quite tasty by itself. But, as a Mexican, being in Chile and not being able to find any real chilli... Was quite odd.

Nothing like texting "hey beautiful! Good morning!" to your "loved ones" group at 7PM!

A friend did a quite decent analysis on Telegram's shortcomings regarding what they offer:

http://blog.tincho.org/posts/T...

He points at this second article, that strongly criticizes Telegram's supposedly strong, proprietary crypto:

http://unhandledexpression.com...

There is a file called documents/My Clippings.txt if I'm not mistaken. Some time ago, I wrote a simple program (kindleclip — https://github.com/gwolf/kindl... ) that presents you highlights, bookmarks and comments, allows you to search, either by book or by date. It's a GTK2 project built with Glade however, and I have not yet ported it to use current alternatives, but at least I believe the source to be quite readable/followable. Hope you find it useful.

Actually... No.

I got my first Acer (marketed in Mexico under the "Printaform" brand, but manuals were all branded Acer) in 1987. The Acer 5201/5203 (single- or double- floppy drives) were quite popular here in Mexico by then.

"Simple" PC clones, built on a passive ISA backplane. The motherboard was just a "special" ISA card with the CPU and the 256KB of RAM in it. First expansion slot had a CGA card, second expansion card was the I/O controller, and it had one free port (to which I eventually hooked up a MFM controller and knew the bliss of having a hard drive).

No, it won't make much sense even with that in mind. Even less, in fact.

Embedded systems are usually factory-installed. In the factory, they don't do the installs via floppies. Most OpenBSD installs today are done off their (very good!) CD-ROM media, or maybe even more, by USB.

Floppy disks are used for a tiny percentage of installs (yes, even of *their* installs). Alright, they don't want to dump very old architectures that are known to work and have no other acceptable bood medium, but in the end... Basing the entire OS in the least common denominator takes a toll on the general usability of the system in everyday settings.

That MySQL's space was/is being transferred to MariaDB, instead of just dying a relatively quick death.

Why bother with MySQL if you can just migrate over to PostgreSQL? Yes, of course, some of the weirdest bits won't work, and errors will now (for a change!) actually interrupt your work instead of silently losing information. But it seemed like a good way to kill that ugly beast!

Are three very different things. Java in the server and in the client is alive and very very much healthy. Ugly and slow applets in the browser thankfully are almost dead — Because HTML5 delivered way better. But applets dying off does not in any way mean Java is any less healthy!

...And yes, after reading the link you sent: More than a cycling proselytizer (which I am), I am a safe cycling proselytizer. Using the road as regular traffic, not running over red lights, not riding on sidewalks, not riding to close to parked cars, not riding against the lane's direction, and a very large etcetera. Wearing a helmet by itself, I agree with bicyclesafe, will not help much if I am a daredevil. But being cautious and wearing a helmet is much better.

Thanks for the not needed course on logic fallacies. I know why I had the accident: Because I was a newbie (as I said, this happened several years ago), and I didn't account for the sight block that a street sign imposed on a car driver. She didn't expect me. Thankfully, she was just starting to move, and the accident was a very minor one.

I know the helmet saved my face — Not with 100% certainty, but quite probably. I also know my then-girlfriend had a much, much smaller accident while not wearing a helmet (she fell by herself at roughly half the speed I was going, because of irregular pavement), and did scratch her head. No, no permanent scars, but a nasty bruise and some scratches that took some weeks to properly heal.

I am active in many local cyclist groups. I know many people who don't wear a helmet out of choice, but I don't know anybody who says an accident's outcome was better because they weren't wearing one.

As I said in my post, I think that were I not to have my helmet on, I'd have a nasty scar, the product of using my forehead as a brake. It was a fairly low speed hit, but my head did hit the pavement *in* the helmet. So, the helmet absorbed some of the impact — but it also put a good 2cm between my skin and the street.

Also, a helmet is coated in plastic to make it smooth, almost derrapant. It would not be impossible for my head, with a far higher friction, to get stuck while reducing the speed of my body - and could end up in spinal damage, maybe fatal.

Of course, I have no way to know if that would happen were I not wearing a helmet. But I won't take chances.