You might be interested in reading about the Piraha tribe in South America. They have no creation stories or myths, nor do they have religion.

This is an interview where Daniel Everett, a researcher who spent many years living with those people and studying their language, in which he shares some interesting highlights: http://7thavenueproject.com/po...

His book "Don't sleep in the jungle, there are snakes" provides a more detailed picture of the Piraha culture and lifestyle.

Their language has a few interesting features, tenses are one of them. They use one form of a verb to talk about things they've seen themselves, and another form for expressing ideas which they have heard from someone who has had first-hand experience.

This makes the language unsuitable for expressing abstract thought (have you ever seen a "derived class" or a "variable" or "cosine of X^2"?). This is also why they have no religion and attempts to christianize them were not successful. "Have you _seen_ Jesus walk on water?" turned out to be a very effective filter for them.

Actually, I was aware of a somewhat different story.

Jupiter's moons are sometimes collectively referred to as "Medicean moons". Galileo chose that name to express gratitude towards his patron/sponsor, the Medici family.

`Galileo's dream` by KSR, is a work of fiction that covers that period of his life and the process of discovering the moons, naming them, and so on. You might enjoy this book.

I am glad they are not updating it; look at what's going on with Skype on Windows - it gets bloated, it has advertisements, it tries to convince you to switch to a Microsoft account, etc.

The Linux version does not have any of these "features" and I prefer it that way. Hopefully, they won't change the protocol to force everyone to get an update.

Would a sonar do the trick? It can be placed on the surface and send pings that will help measure the density of materials on the machine's path.

Earlier versions of Windows allowed that, the MAC could be updated via
- the `Device manager`, in the adapter's advanced settings
- the registry editor, by updating a specific key

The new Device Manager does not provide the option to change the MAC. I've also searched the registry for my current MAC address, to no avail.

Does anyone know if this option was removed, or simply moved to some other place?

I've traveled to several countries in the past year and I've used Osmand (the version on F-droid) with great success - it is completely offline and routing works out of the box, as well as the address search.

The trick is that you have to download the offline maps first.

I have feedback about that activity. A kid was experimenting with batteries and light bulbs - they wouldn't turn on, though his wiring was correct.

After thinking about it and tinkering, it turned out there was a missing dependency - `gnucap`, simulation does not work without it. I didn't know it at the time and it was difficult to figure that out because we were in a remote village with sporadic 3G coverage and all those children were buzzing around with excitement (-:

Perhaps it is better to install it along with GCompris (the child-friendly approach) or turn it off (better, but inconsistent across computers) or show an error message (not child friendly at all).

Yes, that photo caught me while I was battling the problem (-:

I've used GCompris (among other tools) last year in a summer camp for children from socially vulnerable families. It was a project powered by volunteers and donations.

The kids enjoyed it very much, due to the variety of activities available - everyone found something to tinker with. If you're interested, have a look at the photos: http://tinco.md/galerie, https://www.facebook.com/TINCO....

Children liked TuxType and Scratch too, but GCompris ranked #1, especially among the younger ones.

Some youngsters in Moldova had a great summer; and who knows - maybe a few of them will build careers related to computers. And that could be your fault (-:

p.s. I am glad it runs on Android now, I've already recommended it to a parent.

Hi, I teach computer security today and I am curious about what was being discussed in lectures two decades ago. Can you please share your slides?

If you're interested, you can find recordings of my classes by looking for `information security course moldova` on Youtube.

I use MyPaint with my Lenovo X201 tablet, it supports touch and stylus input. The machine is connected to a regular projector and my students and I are very satisfied with this.

Here is an example of a discussion about hash functions in Python; it is a screencast where you can see me doing stuff in the terminal as well as sketching explanations on a blank canvas.

MyPaint is cross platform, it is designed for artists and painters, but I am happy with it as a teacher. I used to rely on OneNote in the past, but I've moved away from Windows quite a few years ago and never looked back.

In one of Richard Stallman's lectures, someone asked him why progress on Hurd is slow. The response was that this is not a pressing matter anymore, as there are other free kernels out there that are mature.

In other words, there are other problems society needs to focus on, so don't hold your breath for GNU Hurd.

According to the spec, the SIM card has several files that contain information about the networks the phone is allowed or disallowed to connect to. These files are EF PLMN and EF FPLMN, they can be edited if you have PIN1. They're present in both, 2G SIM and 3G USIM cards. For more details, see section 10.2.16 EF FPLMN (Forbidden PLMNs) of the corresponding ETSI standard.

This article on PLMN management describes how they can be updated.

Even though this problem has been resolved a long time ago, in my practice I have not encountered a phone that would offer an interface for editing these settings. So you need to do this with a smart card reader and software that knows which APDU commands to send to the card to make the necessary changes.

Please share some of your recipes, I would be delighted to try and "implement" one of those (-:

> Romanians were actually fighting along with Nazis
It should be pointed out that Romania was originally a neutral state. The country was forced to enter the war after the Entente failed to keep its promise.
Romania joined the war on the side of the Axis because at that time the Soviet army occupied the Eastern part of the country (the region known as `Basarabia`) and had no plans of leaving.

So your statement is true, but I think that another reasonable person would've done the same, had they been in the shoes of the Romanian government at the time.

Play against people you trust, so you don't have to worry about cheating.