yep - started with a commodore pet 3032 at school, aged i think it was 8. very unusual that a school actually had a computer. i watched someone type in a program:

10 FOR I = 1 to 40
20 PRINT TAB(I), I
30 NEXT I
40 GOTO 10

and the number scrolled 123455bababababa in a diagonal line, and i went, "ah that's obvious".

from there, i went on to work out how to read the keyboard (GET), we typed in a "would you like a cup of tea?" program (if N goto 10) which explained all about how you needed to make tea. from there i began to write games after someone else brought in an Apple IIe (as a personal computer!) and it had "castle vulfenstein" where you shot german soldiers all very politically correct.

the games i wrote were much simpler (40x25 screen, go figure) and usually involved drawing and moving of dots as "bullets", which could be stopped by on-screen ASCII characters if you were lucky. we set up 3 sets of keys so that 3 of us could play (wasx and z for fire, tghb and okl,) and soon discovered something called "keyboard matrix scanning limitations" whereby one player could hold down keys that cause the other players' controls to be non-functional.

by age 11 we'd moved to skelmersdale, where several neighbours had weird machines like superbrains, jupiter aces, tangerines and one guy even had a Z80 that he clocked by hand with LEDs on the outputs just to see what it did. he actually took notes when i explained what i'd been doing with keyboard input (interactive no less!) and things like screens.

after wrecking my eyes borrowing a neighbour's ZX80 with a ZX81 ROM upgrade, and playing chess in 1k of RAM (unbelievable) and typing in 1-line BASIC programs that would scroll binary across the screen, my parents bought me a ZX Spectrum (and a thermal printer, wow!). and a 16k RAM pack eventually. after several months of typing in games and programs, and playing jet-pac and lemmings, i actually bought my first computer software: a BASIC compiler. it could do 26 variables (A to Z) as integers, no floats, and no strings. cost me 30 quid.

by school aged 13 to 18 i'd moved to BBC Micros - the school had 6 of them, all connected via Econet. memorable times there included writing a program which sent notes to each computer on the network so that tunes with more than 3 notes could be played across all 6 computers; writing networked games and creating something similar to "Risk" which was stolen by one of the kids, hidden under carpet where feet destroyed the 5.25in floppies irretrievably. the lab also had one of those digital programming interfaces, with GPIO, ADCs and DACs, which i used on a BEEB to do strange experiments out-of-hours.

so, naturally, when it came to a choice of university and a choice of degree, perhaps unsurprisingly i picked Theory of Computing at Imperial College. there we had a Gould Terminal system that could connect and route over 2,000 VT100 terminals to a configureable array of servers (micro-vaxes, SunOS 4.1.3 and so on). that started to get interesting, especially when someone did "cat /bin/csh | lpr" by mistake. if you're familiar with line printers, you'll now how bloody fast they are and how much of a racket they make. "cat /bin/csh | lpr" churns out 600 pages *real* fast.

all good fun...

it's more than that: it's actually a criminal offense, known in the U.S. as "Assault by Lawyer". if you repeatedly sue someone, for example, such that they are made bankrupt by the legal fees of doing nothing more than defending themselves, it's actually a criminal offense. could someone please get word to this guy's legal team about this please?

"hiro: you're a fucking gargoyle!"

quote from neal stephenson's book, "snow crash".

my brother worked for mother theresa's hospice in india, 25 years ago. it wasn't what you'd think. they had a number of people come in from different outside organisations who tried to order people around: this being india they of course didn't listen, because why should they listen to foreigners?

so my brother stayed there and worked with them for six months before advising them to build a brick out-house for effluent, to change the sheets on the beds when somebody died, and to wash the needles in between injecting one patient and the next.

it also didn't help that as mother theresa got older, she began to lose her memory and would wander off, go to sleep, taking the key to the medicine cupboard with her so that nobody could get access to it for an entire day.

ghandi on the other hand is a far better choice for discussion, here. i love the story where he was asked by a mother to tell her son to stop eating sweets: he told her to come back in 2 weeks. when they came back, he said, "stop eating sweets!" and the son went "yes yes mr ghandi!!". the mother, perplexed, asked "why didn't you do that 2 weeks ago??" and he said "because i had to first give up sweets myself".

now *that's* inspiring, and it tells you something that we can learn from this fuss over 3D printing. there's no point asking "what would ghandi do with a 3D printer" because it's the principles that ghandi applied in his life *whenever he met someone* that are the key. it's never about the technology: it's about the people and what they face.

the point is: asking this question is silly. what you need is just to have the 3D printer, and go wander around the world, meeting people. you'll soon find problems that can be solved with it.

there are two ways. my favourite is the first.

1) put passport / credit card on a plate
2) put small amount of water on top of NFC chip
3) put plate into microwave oven
4) set for 3 seconds on HIGH
5) press button and watch pretty sparks
6) open door VERY QUICKLY and put out anything that's smoking or on fire
7) smile and relax, knowing that you are secure from being phished.

the other way is perhaps less risky:

1) obtain a 50,000 volt electrocution device aka "stun gun"....

no i'm not. the extreme case is buying all china parts and sourcing a 32mhz XTAL that's only available in europe. the lead times alone would absolutely kill such a project, let alone getting the export licenses.

TI's SoCs for example - the ones with a DSP - are actually classified as "weapons" for god's sake! they have BXPA "Munitions" classifications slapped on them.

remember that it's usually the top-end ICs that are exclusively made in e.g. Taiwan: there are plenty of semiconductor companies that can do 65nm and above. supply is *not* geographically restricted.

you're right... and yet this should not surprise anyone. insert "country X" for "Chinese" and you'll get the same answer. in fact, i think you'll find that "company X prefers to work with parts that are sourced locally".

with the rhombus tech initiative, we're doing ok. just :) it is extremely hard though. luckily i've been picking parts that are clearly and obviously commonly available, done in volumes so huge that the datasheets leaked in some cases years ago out onto the internet.

but yes: it's much easier to just pay a chinese PCB design house and say "make this please" :)

no, they're not. they're a profit-maximising company, just like any other profit-maximising company. if they did what you're accusing them of doing, they'd go bankrupt.

what we believe they have done is just said, "right: we're going to aim BIG". rather than be scared shitless of the NREs for processor development, they simply decided that they would aim for an extremely large number of processors, and either got a PRC Govt Grant or just got very very good investors. they would then have negotiated an EXTREMELY good rate with one of the fabs, based on the projected volume, and that alone would allow them to sell at the price that they set out to sell at. especially if they placed a cash order for a vast number of chips.

so it's simple economics and sound business sense that has allowed them to sell a 1ghz processor at $7.50 when all *PREVIOUS* competition *INCLUDING COMPETITORS IN CHINA* were selling at around $11 or even $13 for a product that had less features.

the other thing that has allowed them to take the world by storm in this area is the extremely high level of integration in their SoC, as well as working with (i believe they actually own) X-Powers to create an exceptionally low-cost and highly optimised Power Management IC, called the AXP209. the cost of this PMIC is $1.50 in volume.

basically you can get away with $30 worth of parts to do a seriously good little board, which has 1gb of RAM, 4gb of NAND Flash, ethernet, SATA, USB2 and HDMI and more, when everyone else is struggling to hit $35 to $38. that's a big, big difference in this kind of market, and it explains why, when the Allwinner A10 was introduced, that a major recession occurred INSIDE CHINA, in the Electronics District of Guangdong, Shenzen.

i'll say that again, in case you didn't understand. whilst you are accusing China (the country) of "price dumping in the USA", *one very ambitious young company* managed to cause a MAJOR RECESSION IN THEIR OWN COUNTRY.

why is that? it's because the electronics industry in china is critically dependent on and focussed on volume sales. the Allwinner A10 and its associated PMIC and high level of integration left many factories holding out-of-date stock. companies that did NOT move over to the A10 in time were left with stock that they couldn't shift. if they did shift - reneging on contracts in the process, in many cases - they left the SUPPLIERS holding the stock, and i don't know if you're aware of this but China basically operates on a cash-only, cash-up-front basis.

the shift caused by the introduction of the A10 was so vast, and so quick, that it basically wiped out any company that didn't change over in time. including the ODM company that we were talking to at the time, whose clients (factories) all had invested in AMLogic's $13 processor at the time.

so - please do be better informed before making assumptions and accusations such as those which you are making, ok? the country you live in is a very small market compared to china. america is not even particularly relevant, here, because americans expects bigger, better and much much faster than a 1ghz single-core low-power ARM processor. please take more care, ok?

what's interesting is that these people are claiming that the attacks *originate* from china, and that therefore, logically as well, it MUST be the chinese government that instigated these attacks. noooOoo: unless the U.S. has access to the entire world's internet traffic plus all communications globally including mobile phones, telephone lines and every single server and electronic device, there's absolutely NO WAY that they can prove that accusation - period.

why not? because even if an attack "appears" to originate from within china, all that means is that the traffic is coming from an IP address that's inside the china boundaries. and that's *all* it means. it does *NOT* mean that there is not SOMEONE ELSE who is OUTSIDE of china who has compromised that machine and is using it as a DDOS hacking jump-point in order to deliberately mask their true location [and identity].

the hacking could even be done through servers that are compromised and happen to have access to a telephone or a 3G dongle. dial in, initiate attack: you'd never be able to ascertain the identity of the attacker [unless you had access to china's telephone network records].

for all we know, the hacking is actually being instigated by the CIA as a means to have an excuse to justify yet another war or yet another round of political maneuvring.

even if it's random usage of compromised machines rather than intentional misdirection, the percentage of computers compromised by viruses world-wide is quite likely to have a disproportionate number of IP addresses originating from china simply through sheer numbers of people in china who have computers.

there are plenty of foreign governments who would have an interest in the kind of information being claimed to have been sought. why does it *have* to be china that's doing the attacking?

foobsr: there's a book you should read, it's called "journey of souls" by michael newton. i believe you'll find it both insightful and comforting.

the next breakthrough would be to work out a categorical and undeniable way to demonstrate what those thought processes *are* that make a difference, i.e. what *kinds* of thoughts result in slowing down of ageing.

the very very unfortunate thing for those people who like to bash religion, meditation *and* science by sitting on one side of the fence or other and slinging mud [cue down-moderation of this post as an example, because i dared to link science and meditation *shock horror*], will be that it will be found that deep restful states of meditation are the way to gain the kind of control over the hypothalamus that is being described, here.

this link between thoughts and "physical effect" really isn't that hard to imagine. examples are as follows:

* "i'm hungry". if you're a dog, you automatically salivate at the sight of food.
* "i'm angry". you release chemicals into your bloodstream, such as adrenaline.
* "i hate you". your body releases chemicals that are similar to SNAKE VENOM. hatred *literally* poisions you.
* "i love you". all sorts of wonderful endorphins released. and a hell of a lot of hormones.
* fulfilment of vengeance (revenge) releases a chemical that *literally* tastes "sweet". hence the phrase "revenge is sweet".

thought. chemicals. thought. chemicals. thought. chemicals. the chain is *really* clear.

why is it therefore so hard for people to understand that control over thoughts can result in significant life-prolonging benefits?

perhaps it is because it's actually quite hard to keep control over our thoughts. or maybe we wish to deny the link, so that it's possible to continue to feel whatever-we-wish-to-feel without considering that there might be consequences [for ourselves]. that would be a *lot* easier, wouldn't it. i'll be interested to see if the "wisdom of crowds" a la "slashdot moderation" as a whole accepts these kinds of words. very interested indeed.

ok. there's a couple of solutions here. one is to query a number of peers for the same object, obtain its MD5 (or other) checksum and validate them aand the other iiiis...

yes. exactly. git allows you to GPG sign tags. the GPG-signed tags would be the key point around which you would verify that you (ultimately) got the right objects. and it's the GPG-signed tags that would allow you to decide to fork an entire project, or upgrade an entire gnu/linux distro, by simply setting a new target to pull and verify against.

the question which i have yet to resolve is: what the hell do you do about all the intermediate commits, intermediate objects etc. etc.? enough idiots trying to corrupt the system would result in quite a lot of bandwidth wasted before you got to the point where the git tagged branch could be verified by MD5 summing.

what i don't quite understand, though, is why git over http (or any other network protocol) doesn't have the same issue. or, is it the fact that there is only one central control typically for a particular branch (or tag) that makes this moot? so you know that you're only going to ever be pulling one git pack-object from that one server, and having done so you're now up-to-date so can do the checksum, bam, done.

the problem that you've got is the resentment of several years - decades - of abusively-high pricing. people feel that they've been ripped off, so they have no qualms about copying. *UNFORTUNATELY* that mind-set is now entrenched, and an independent artist selling their own creative material is, sadly, going to get hit by that.

whom can the finger be "pointed at" for this situation? well, some would say the record labels for being greedy. but there's a counter-example which illustrates that that's not *entirely* the case. in japan, they love anime. so much so that the fans actually support the directors in every way possible. when a film comes out, the director distributes it first on bittorrent. the fans copy it, enjoy it, buy the t-shirts, buy the merchandise. they distribute it, they translate it, they produce their own dubbed soundtracks, and redistribute them freely.

but here's the kicker: when the official DVDs come out, they PULL THE BITTORRENTs AND GO OUT AND BUY THE DVD.

bear in mind that this is japan, but that's still absolutely stunning. and it puts us westerners lamenting a situation where our poor artists cannot make a living in this day and age to absolute shame. food for thought.