Design Hardware/Software for Global Civil Society

-cman- writes "White box builders and Gnome hackers take note! With the announcement of various oxymoronic "trusted computing" initiatives in recent week, Bruce Sterling, self-appointed Pope-Emperor of the Viridian Design Movement has announced a new design contest to design a '...genuinely trustable, cheap, well-designed, rugged, sexy, accessible computer system that is owned, manufactured and operated for, well, Global Civil Society.'" I'll buy one.

Comments

And I thought I was cynical . . .

[npsimons]

There's no way. You would, in effect, have to re-design every part of the computer to manage this. This includes a different card spec (PCI and AGP are apparently not multi-culti enough), a different CPU (they display corporate logos, after all), different BIOS (corporate logos again), etc. You would have re-design the entire computer, ignoring all existing specs. This is crazy.

While I'll have to agree that Sterling's proposal seems off the wall and not very well thought out, it's still an idea that appeals to me for some reason. Maybe it's the thought that there has to be a better way (yes, even better than Linux). Maybe I'm just not cynical enough and I still dream of seeing a world in which a paperless office becomes a reality without losing our freedom of speech.

Hope is a waking dream.
-- Aristotle

I refuse to just let the corporations steamroll over my rights - and yours. I've been through depression, but I've never given up, and I never will.

We will be better and braver if we engage and inquire than if we indulge in the idle fancy that we already know -- or that it is of no use seeking to know what we do not know.
-- Plato

So you say it's crazy? So you say it's impossible? Oh, well let's just not give it another thought then! Let's let the CEO's of Microsoft and Enron do the thinking for us. Surely, they have our best interests at heart, and there's nothing we can do to improve our lot.

You see things; and you say "Why?"
But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"
-- George Bernard Shaw, "Back to Methuselah"

Well, I'll tell you what: you can sit on your rump, telling the ones who are out there doing the impossible that it's impossible. If that's what you really want, you can have it. I'll leave you with one last quote to ruminate upon:

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
-- Albert Einstein