dhamma.org is also interesting from business model point of view.. the system will not accept pay from newbies; you can only pay after you pay your dues (sit down and shut up for 10 days straight).. you might think b) people would game the system for free room/board or a) this can't scale.. but the facts prove otherwise:
from a little center started in lates 60's, in india, now there are hundreds of centers around the world.. when i got to mexico in late 2005, there was one center, now there are three.. the system is growing.. people tend to pay after they get the goods, because it feels good and right..
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/163 "We live in violent times, an era of heightened warfare, genocide and senseless crime. Or so we've come to believe. Pinker charts a history of violence from Biblical times through the present, and says modern society has a little less to feel guilty about.".. i'd bet better communication between peoples does reduce violence.
lingq, italki, polyglot etc, like the livemocha service blurbed in article, lever unprecedented web communication between peoples of different language cultures.. twext and synxi video text may also be useful in these exchanges.. especially if focused on popular music culture, which would be delyric.. an interesting example of media rich language exchange may start with the best language learners on earth, here: http://laptop.org/en/languages.shtml
synxi theory: with tools to easily sync/caption youtube, kaltura, etc, we can make a fun way to learn/teach each other language, (ie engelsk, spansk, norsk, etc)
3. http://twext.com/overview wants great hacker to add value to unicode texts by formatting them twext. Why? So we can more easily learn natural language like Español, Français, Português, etc etc. So we can communicate better. Twext text works on computers and prints on paper. Today, a billion people are learning English.
ok.. i'm a designer with an idea for a business with global potential, stalled because i'm programming illiterate.. thus, i seek a programming partner, and am especially interested in data driven read/write web, hence RoR.. i'm not in South Africa, but would consider moving anywhere to get this thing done.. to learn more, google "twexter"
news = WASTE
Because 40 percent of the oceans are classified as subtropical gyres, a fourth of the planet’s surface area has become an accumulator of floating plastic debris. What can be done with this new class of products made specifically to defeat natural recycling? How can the dictum “In ecosystems, everything is used” be made to work with plastic?
http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/master.html?http://www.natu...
hack = ENERGY
Every hour, the first commercial version will turn 10 tons of auto waste—tires, plastic, vinyl—into enough natural gas to produce 17 million BTUs of energy (it will use 956,000 of those BTUs to keep itself running)..
Pringle created the machine about 10 years ago after he drove by a massive tire fire and thought about the energy being released. He went home and threw bits of a tire in a microwave emitter he’d been working with for another project. It turned to what looked like ash, but a few hours later, he returned and found a black puddle on the floor of the unheated workshop. Somehow, he’d struck oil.
Their first order is under construction in Rockford, Illinois. It’s a $5.1-million microwave machine the size of small bus called the Hawk, bound for an auto-recycler in Long Island, New York. More deals loom: The U.S. military may use Hawks in Iraq on waste such as water bottles and food containers.
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/flat/bown/2007/innovator_2.html
idea = trawl for free plastic in oceans, zap with Pringle's machine, cleaner oceans, more energy, less waste..