He is determined to provide affordable, good quality food. Foodking's meals cost 20-45 rupees (25p-54p; $0.37-0.84) each - which would more usually buy only fast food.
To keep prices low, premises are simple. And while Sarath is happy to pitch in and help the workers out, he's tough on waste, challenging staff over unused chopped vegetables and taps left running.
BBC News - My Business: The slum dweller who founded a food chain
]]>Day and night the conference line was never dead. Blind phone phreaks all over the country, lonely and isolated in homes filled with active sighted brothers and sisters, or trapped with slow and unimaginative blind kids in straitjacket schools for the blind, knew that no matter how late it got they could dial up the conference and find instant electronic communion with two or three other blind kids awake over on the other side of America. Talking together on a phone hookup, the blind phone phreaks say, is not much different from being there together. Physically, there was nothing more than a two-inch-square wafer of titanium inside a vast machine on Vancouver Island. For the blind kids there meant an exhilarating feeling of being in touch, through a kind of skill and magic which was peculiarly their own.
The article that inspired Steve Jobs: "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" - Slate Magazine
]]>Your Picks: Top 100 Science-Fiction, Fantasy Books
More than 5,000 of you nominated. More than 60,000 of you voted. And now the results are in. The winners of NPR's Top 100 Science-Fiction and Fantasy survey are an intriguing mix of classic and contemporary titles. Over on NPR's pop culture blog, Monkey See, you can find one fan's thoughts on how the list shaped up, get our experts' take, and have the chance to share your own.
]]>High in the Pamir mountains, Afghanistan meets its northern neighbour Tajikistan on the banks of the thundering Panj River.
For most of the last century, this marked the southern limit of Soviet Central Asia, and there is still an outpost in the form of a Russian-speaking village with a single narrow bridge across the river.
I crossed the bridge and stepped back 100 years.
On the Tajik side were cars, electric lights, piped water and central heating and on the Afghan side donkeys, candles, water buckets and smoky yak-dung fires.
From here a finger of Afghanistan goes east for 350km (200 miles), separating Tajikistan from Pakistan.
This is the so-called Wakhan Corridor, a relic of the 19th Century "Great Game" between Britain and Russia. It leads to the High Pamir, where four separate mountain ranges come together in a tangle of peaks and glaciers.
BBC News - Yak's milk hospitality in the remote Pamir mountains
]]>But space is a particularly romanticised part of our vision of exploration, says Dr Eric Rabkin, a professor of English at the University of Michigan who specialises in science fiction.
It's because of the unknown, he says. Trains must go where tracks have previously been laid down and planes have to fly where they can ultimately land.
"Ships are inherently romantic because they can go where no one has before. Ships are associated with freedom and conquest," says Rabkin.
]]>A lot of the things we cherish today lead to thete lifestyles and they result in us ultimately destroying ourselves. Stephenson posits an alternative: tribes. And, in Diamond Age, the most successful tribe is the neo-Victorians. The thetes resent them and call them "vickies." The big idea there was that what really matters in a post-scarcity economic world is not your economic status (what you have) but the intelligence that goes into who you are, who you know, and who will trust you.
And so the essence of tribalism involves building a culture that has a shared striving for excellence and an infrastructure for education that other tribes not only admire but seek out. And they want to join your tribe. And that's what makes you the most powerful tribe. That's what gives you your status.
So, in Diamond Age, the "vickie" schools become their competitive advantage. After all, a nanotech society needs smart people who can deal with the technological issues. So how do you teach nanotechnology to eighth graders? Well, you have to radically, aggressively approach not only teaching the technology but the cohesion and the manners and values that will make the society successful.
From Gamification to Intelligence Amplification to The Singularity | ACCELER8OR
]]>One April evening in 1973--at the height of the flood--a fisherman walked onto the structure. There is, after all, order in the universe, and some things take precedence over impending disasters. On the inflow side, facing the Mississippi, the structure was bracketed by a pair of guide walls that reached out like curving arms to bring in the water. Close by the guide wall at the south end was the swirling eddy, which by now had become a whirlpool. There was other motion as well--or so it seemed. The fisherman went to find Dugas, in his command post at the north end of the structure, and told him the guide wall had moved. Dugie told the fisherman he was seeing things. The fisherman nodded affirmatively.
When Dugie himself went to look at the guide wall, he looked at it for the last time. "It was slipping into the river, into the inflow channel."
]]>One night, I was guarding a prisoner with a friend of mine, a guy I had gone to church with before we had deployed. So we're sitting there and my friend starts making threatening statements about what he wants to do to the prisoner. It wasn't too uncommon to abuse prisoners, but I didn't feel like it was right, so I asked my friend about the American ideals that we grew up hearing about. I said, "Why would you do that to this guy? Isn't one of the values that we were raised with is that somebody's innocent until proven guilty?" My friend said, "No, this guy is Iraqi, he's part of the problem, he's guilty, and here's what I want to do to him." That wasn't unusual. It had gotten to the point where most people blamed the entire Iraqi population and said that if they would just fix their own country, we could go home.
I thought back to all the stuff I'd heard sitting next to this guy in church, and I asked him, "Well, even if he is guilty, what about the idea of loving our enemies and returning evil with good and turning the other cheek? How do you reconcile all those teachings?" My friend said, "I think that Jesus would have turned his cheek once or twice but he never would have let anyone punk him around." Hearing him say it that way just made it sound so ridiculous. Here we supposedly had faith in this guy who very clearly was punked around, and ended up living and dying with sacrificial love. From then on, I really had to face the fact that I couldn't have it both ways. Either I was going to try to find this inward reality where sacrificial love was possible for a higher goal, or I was going to let self-defense be my ultimate value.
]]>I always approached software with this philosophy. I've often been paid for programming, but I've been paid directly for the hours I spent programming. I never even considered it reasonable to be paid again for programming I did in the past. How is that fair, just, or quite frankly, even necessary? If I get a job building a house, I can't get paid every day someone uses that house. Indeed, even if I built the house, I shouldn't get a royalty paid every time the house is resold to a new owner0. Why should software work any differently? Indeed, there's even an argument that software, since it's so much more trivial to copy than a house, should be available gratis to everyone once it's written the first time.
I recently heard (for the first time) an old story about a well-known Open Source company (which no longer exists, in case you're wondering). As the company grew larger, the company's owners were annoyed that the company could only bill the clients for the hour they worked. The business was going well, and they even had more work than they could handle because of the unique expertise of their developers. The billable rates covered the cost of the developers' salaries plus a reasonable profit margin. Yet, the company executives wanted more; they wanted to "make new money even when everyone was on vacation". In essence, having all the new, well-paid programming work in the world wasn't enough; they wanted the kinds of obscene profits that can only be made from proprietary licensing. Having learned this story, I'm pretty glad the company ceased to exist before they could implement their "make money while everyone's on the beach" plan. Indeed, the first order of business in implementing the company's new plan was, not surprisingly, developing some new from-scratch code not covered by GPL that could be proprietarized. I'm glad they never had time to execute on that plan.
I'll just never be fully comfortable with the idea that workers should get money for work they already did. Work is only valuable if it produces something new that didn't exist in the world before the work started, or solves a problem that had yet to be solved. Proprietary licensing and financial bets on market derivatives have something troubling in common: they can make a profit for someone without requiring that someone to do any new work. Any time a business moves away from actually producing something new of value for a real human being, I'll always question whether the business remains legitimate.
Proprietary Software Licensing Produces No New Value In Society - Bradley M. Kuhn ( Brad ) ( bkuhn )
]]>Inside the breezeblock ciderhouse, the air is cool and damp. The atmosphere is anything but. Six ruddy-nosed Scotsmen, down for the week, merrily poke fun at each other around a Formica table, a tankard in each hand and a few crumbs of cheese in front. Next to them, four large barrels of cider - two sweet, two dry - sit in a row, hissing out the day's cider to any pilgrim who turns up with an empty glass. The wall opposite is covered with photographs and cuttings, including an interview with the late Clash singer Joe Strummer. Encircled is his description of happiness: "chilling in Somerset with a flagon of Wilkins' Farmhouse Cider". No-one here today would disagree.
BBC - Travel - The West Country's cider trail : Food & Drink, Great Britain
]]>When it was gone; the oak forests of England were on the floor. Four thousand had fallen in the New Forest alone; another 3,000 in the Forest of Dean. And John Evelyn, the Fellow of the Royal Society, whose great book Silva or a Discourse on Forest-Trees, first published in 1664, had done the most to make the connection between the oak woods and England's fortunes, stared in heartsick disbelief at the devastation.
He had spent so much of his life and effort persuading the government and great landowners not to destroy woodlands for farmland; to create protective nurseries fenced against the grazing of deer until the trees were mature enough to thrive unguarded. Not to wreck the plantation of the nation's future for quick profits in the iron forges.
Slowly Evelyn had made his case. And now he stared at the wreckage, the disheartening spectacle. It had happened at the worst time. The country was at war, fending off, as Evelyn saw it, the Catholic absolutism of Louis XIV.
Without oak for the hulls of the Navy's ships of the line, what would become of fortress England? "Sure I am," Evelyn wrote a little later, with only a year of his life remaining "that I still feel the dismal groans of our forests, that late hurricane having subverted so many thousands of goodly oaks, prostrating the trees, laying them in ghastly postures like whole regiments fallen in battle by the sword of the Conqueror.."
But if John Evelyn died thinking he had lost a battle against ferocious weather, his campaign for the oak would win a longer war. During the 18th Century, driven by the hunger for naval timber, planting began in earnest. Book after book urged landowners to do the patriotic - and profitable thing.
The very idea of Britain - a new idea - was planted with the acorns. In 1763 a disciple of Evelyn's, Roger Fisher, published Heart of Oak, The British Bulwark, in which he argued empires rose or fell depending on their abundance or dearth of the sovereign hardwood.
]]>Saying that the kernel should have no protocol understanding because you might wish to decode the signals from the remote to your 1976 airconditioner using a diode hooked to the mic connector on your soundcard sound to me like saying TCP/IP and the e1000 driver shouldn't be in the kernel because you might want to run SNA/SDLC over your homebrew hardware connected to a serial port (hint, you can - from userspace).
]]>A new study confirms that the reaction time of cell phone users slows dramatically, increasing the risk of accidents and tying up traffic in general, and when young adults use cell phones while driving, they're as bad as sleepy septuagenarians.
"If you put a 20-year-old driver behind the wheel with a cell phone, their reaction times are the same as a 70-year-old driver who is not using a cell phone," said University of Utah psychology professor David Strayer. "It's like instantly aging a large number of drivers."
The study was announced today and is detailed in winter issue of the quarterly journal Human Factors.
Cell phone distraction causes 2,600 deaths and 330,000 injuries in the United States every year, according to the journal's publisher, the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.
Drivers talking on cell phones were 18 percent slower to react to brake lights, the new study found. In a minor bright note, they also kept a 12 percent greater following distance. But they also took 17 percent longer to regain the speed they lost when they braked. That frustrates everyone.
Drivers on Cell Phones Kill Thousands, Snarl Traffic | LiveScience
]]>According to the report, qualities such as application, self-regulation and empathy were more likely to be developed in children whose parents employed a "tough love" approach.
It found that these qualities made "a vital contribution to life chances, mobility and opportunity".
The report said these characteristics were profoundly shaped in pre-school years.
The Building Character report analysed data from more than 9,000 households in the UK.
It found that children from the richest backgrounds were more than twice as likely to develop the key characteristics compared to those with the poorest origins.
Additionally, children whose parents were married were twice as likely to show such traits than children from lone parent or step-parented families, the report said.
But it added that when parental style and confidence were factored in, the difference in child character development between richer and poorer families disappeared.
The report concluded that this indicated that parenting was the most important influence - and the same result occurred when the family structure factor was analysed.
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