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UN Internet Summit High Points
hotsauce writes "Negroponte has unveiled his $100 laptop with Kofi Annan at the UN Internet summit. The plan is to have several countries, both rich and poor, sign up for at least a million each of these machines within a year. Many countries and companies seem interested. Also at the UN summit, the ITU is predicting an internet of things, and warning that social safeguards need to be put in place, as the BBC gleefully talks about employers watching workers via RFID tags." From the article: "Although children will be able to interact with each other through the machines, education was still the priority for the laptops. But by using mesh networking, the vision is for children to interact while doing homework, and even share homework tips on a local community scale. "
Looks like a few million africans are gonna get their first taste of hardcore porn!
Here's to the internet!!
More info on the $100 laptop, as well as some good pictures, can be found here.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Be thankful no-one's decided to call it The Thingternet. Yet.
He'll make a hundred million dollars if all goes according to plan.
Wait, that can't be right...
Anyone know their profit margin? It can't be more than a dollar per machine.
share homework tips
"In the game of life, someone always has to lose. To me, if life were fair, that someone would always be Oklahoma." -DKR
But by using mesh networking, the vision is for children to interact while doing homework, and even share homework tips on a local community scale.
Kids already have a way to interact while doing school work: It's called SCHOOL!
Let's stop waiting and hoping for "Pie in the sky" solutions for problems that already have a low-tech solution.
Let's start using what we have, and stop looking as technology as a panacea to fix the worlds' ills.
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
Nah, the guy's an idiot. Lets start with books, teachers and a trade system which doesn't punish the poorest countries in the world. (Yeah, you fucked up (again) Mandelson. This time people are gonna die though.)
Deleted
...an RFID tag for my tinfoil hat?
This is a sig. It is appended to the end of comments I post.
Coincidence? I think not!
I'll take one.
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
"the vision is for children to interact while doing homework, and even share homework tips on a local community scale."
.. rather than homework tips.
Don't they actually mean children sharing homework
As far as the laptops, good idea, since most processor and hardware is still effectively wasted in terms of what is actually needed to produce x amount of text, display a picture, act like a scientific calculator or display what amounts to a powerpoint deck.
Apparently the plan is to rot the minds of third-world children, thus preventing them from becoming a threat to the US in the future. How diabolical! Kudos to the UN for facilitating this.
Have you read my blog lately?
Hi, my name is XXXXXX, and I am a young member of the Nigerian Royal Family. I am in need of assistance from a trustworthy person. I have homework stored on a Nigerian Server, and I will gladly give you 10% of the homework for your assistance in getting it out...
I love the quote... "now students can learn by doing"
OMFG it took this long for people to realize this? I get a kick out of the experts that poo-poo the small scale engineering projects that MIT is doing that give basically an electronics lab, CAD system, Machine shop and other advanced equipment to common people in small villages. They say that it takes years of higher education to learn how to design things, while 8-12 year old kids learn how to do their craft in less than 24 months and create things that the masters degrees could not think of them selves.
if you give children and people the tools they will learn how to use those tools and usually exceed the experts that are trained to use them in a specific way.
I really hope that they allow these $100.00 laptops to be modified as that is the real place to learn by taking that device way outside the box it was defined in.
If a kid in Kenya can write his own software on the machine instead os using it as an appliance then they will learn even more.
and personally, I really want one for a hiking/7day backpacking device for recording journal events and carrying maps and other information.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
But if I have one hand tied up clicking the mouse and the other hand tied up...well, you know...how am I supposed to turn the crank?
Here are the top 15 most repressive countries when it comes to the Internet, according to Reporters without Borders:
Saudi Arabia, Belarus, Burma, China, North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Libya, Maldives, Nepal, Uzbekhistan, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan and Vietnam.
Remember: it's a free Internet as long as you fight for its freedom.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
How do I get my hands on one of these $100 laptops?
I'd love a lightweight laptop for word processing on the train ride to and from work but I don't have the money to spend what conventional laptops cost. I also love the idea of generating juice through a handcrank.
But I can't, for the life of me, figure out a way to get one. Is there going to be any offering to the general public instead of just to governments?
Dear diary: Today I stuffed some dolls full of dead rats I put in the blender.
Not sure if that's the legacy we wanted to leave, giving the third world l33t sp33k, but I think we all know that's whats gonna happen...
-everphilski-
To take part in the initiative, governments have to commit to buying a million machines for around $100 each
I am sure he has great intentions, but making a gov commit to 100 million units sounds like he is in this to make more money.
-- Yes, I work for the government, and yes I am watching you.
Does this seem eerily similar to Stephenson's primer from The Diamond Age?
at a facility (hospitality industry) that relies on labor that tends to slack off, I've contemplated myself the expense of setting rfid tag readers on every door in the building, and rfid tags on each nametag and employee key..
think about it, what employer wouldn't kill to know that an employee (or 4) were within the same space for a extended period of time.
It's gonna happen.. face it... it's just a more technological method of old security 'turnkey' boxes around a building, requiring a guard to 'log in' as he makes his rounds.
when you work, you agree to exchange your free time and muscle power and brain power for cash
what's so wrong with the employer maximizing the return on expense?
Here in The US, a technologically above-average country, classroom technology is going to waste because the college educated teachers are too lazy or not smart enough to learn how to apply the technology.
In a poor third world country, where the standards are significantly lower for instructors, who expects the students and instructors will somehow instinctively know how to use these computers for educational benefit? If they are networked the kids will very quickly figure out how to IM answers during tests, but only if they first learn to type.
coldheat soldering iron sux!
do not buy, why in the world thinkgeek is selling it makes me wonder.
It's shit, it's crap, it's a rip-off, don't buy!!!!
... as much as I worry about government. The UK is already talking about recording the location of every vehicle at all times. That's a lot more intrusive to me than my boss tracking me via an "RFID" tag. I can always quit a job. It's not as easy quitting a country.
Amazing that we don't see these in more products other than weird survivalist gear. How long is your laptop going to last during a blackout?
How?, Where? What will RFID tags do to make HIV drugs cheaper? When can we expect these revolutions? Who is working on them? Where in hell did this assertion come from? What does this have to do with "Cars that warn their owners when they develop a fault"? Mine already does that via dashboard lights?
Honestly, is this an article about the issues surrounding next-generation technology and the direction whe are heading or is just some free-association wishlist?
Lets look at the underlying issues. A UN body presents a report outlining privacy issues, health-and safety issues, and other looming crises that must be addressed now before ubiquitous sensors, and rfid tags become too commonplace to regulate effectively.
And what does the BBC do? They give us more padding than pudding and spend most of the article lauding the joys of ubiqquitous sensors ("better coffee") and the growth of RFID tags ("Wal-Mart made the chinese use them") than addressing or even framing the issues raised. And then whan they run out of filler factoids they make more pie-in-the-sky promises like the ones above.
This isn't an article, it's a lullaby: "don't worry about privacy, your bag will tell you when you forgot to shop at Wal-Mart."
Proprietary formats will have to be marginalized. I know this laptop is "just for kids" but if all the content is in .doc , .wma, quicktime, etc. then a lot of people will be left out in the dark. I think there will be a groundswell of resentment and awareness of the ridiculousness of proprietary formats. Once most content is available in standard formats, one of the largest hurdles to adopting Linux elsewhere will disappear.
I'd love to roll Linux out district-wide in our school district. The problem is that there is so much content our there that our teachers and students wouldn't have access to. Sure, the older formats have been reverse engineered or cracked, but the modern, up-to-date content would probably be unusable. What about eBooks? Most of the text book vendors can't agree on a standard and when they do it DRM'ed to hell and require a proprietary [Windows] app to play it. If "all the children of the world" get a linux laptop, that will have to change.
Here's hoping!
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
1: Fair trade. While the US and EU preach free and fair trade, they continue to subsidize their corn and sugar farmers, who inturn dump their excess produce in poorer nations, effectively killing local production.
2: Less production of greenhouse gases. The US alone produces 25% of these gases, yet it has a tiny fraction of human kind living on this globe. The sad thing is that poorer nations pay for the repercussions in way of floods and droughts. Think of unusual weather patterns.
The only way the US and EU countries will listen is when tropical diseases knock at their doors. The bad thing is that ordinary folks might pay with their lives before a cure is found. There are already incidents of malaria in the US in regions where it never existed before.
Am I wrong on these facts?
http://www.bnamericas.com/story.jsp?sector=1&idiom a=I¬icia=334597
Govt snubs US$100 laptop program - Argentina, Chile
Published: Thursday, November 3, 2005 17:16 (GMT -0400)
The Chilean government has announced that it will not participate in the "One Laptop Per Child" program being promoted by MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte, regional press reported on Thursday.
While the Argentine government recently committed to purchasing at least half a million of the US$100 computers, the Chilean authorities showed no interest acquiring them.
"The first shipment of these computers will be in either December 2006 and January 2007, so it would be utopian to commit [to buy] a number of computers that do not yet exist," Hugo Martínez, national director of the Chilean government's Enlaces technology program, was quoted as saying by local newspaper supplement Mouse.cl.
"[We also have] questions about their educational use and about the contents and types of interaction that they would produce," said Martínez.
Martínez also put forth an apparently protectionist argument, saying that Negroponte's program "could hurt local vendors if we don't develop a way for the ministry to buy machines that are not distributed by traditional channels."
"In Chile there is a generalized rejection of innovation," countered Tim Delhaes, a local high-tech entrepreneur and general coordinator of open source initiative Viva Firefox. "In eight years of developing tech start-ups it was impossible to get government support for anything if you weren't an already established company," he said.
"The government's decision to not participate in the US$100 laptop initiative almost certainly has to do with intense lobbying by Microsoft and Intel, companies the [Chilean] government has close ties to, because the laptop would use a Linux operating system and AMD chips," said Delhaes.
The Chilean government plans to run a trial program of branded laptops in an unspecified number of schools during 2006, said Enlaces' Martínez, and would be more than happy to share its findings with Negroponte, he added.
By Scott Sadowsky
www.BNamericas.com
Step 1: Build for $110
Step 2: Sell for $100
Step 3: Get someone else to pay the difference + margin
Step 4: PROFIT?
I suspect, looking at the photos, that thing is so small that only children will be able to use them.
I like the hand crank, tho'. Always wanted one of those on my computer.
----------
Any problem can be made unsolvable if there are enough meetings made to discuss it.
I saw NONPROFIT mentioned more than once.
Besides, if he wanted to make money offer it for 150$ on the regular market and give governments a 33% discount.
Maybe he will, I could certainly use one of these things.
...is the hand-crank. I can see kids in poor African villages spending their days out in the sun, cranking furiously while trying to play WoW. How much you want to bet that as you crank the handle you hear tinny carnival music and a small Bill Gates head pops out of the top.
My problem is, where is all the infrastructure going to come from? At some point a lot of these places need Internet connectivity, and frankly not everyone in the Third World has convenient access to electricity, let alone a wireless Internet connection. Bill Gates better get out his checkbook.
Do not get me wrong, I'm all for it, as long as it is done right and not as some panacea to appease the general populace. I think a lot of kids in the Third World, or anywhere for that matter, would get a better education if they had a) decent homes, b) clean water, c) lots of food, and d) schools with books and teachers.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
I'll buy one for $200-300 and they can give 1-2 for free to kids in developing countries. I can afford paying more than them if I want a fun little gadget terminal to play around with. A school in a third world country probably needs pencils, paper, crayons, chalk and books instead of this. Set up a webshop where we geeks can buy these and use the income to donate computers to those who can't afford them. It won't finance the entire project, but it could help?
What is the sound of one hand clapping?
cat
While I find this accomplishment impressive, I think energy should be focused on the basics in poor nations. Basic necessities like food, clean water, healthcare are more vital. Yes technology is great, but look at the US. Every kid uses a computer from day one and we still lag behind many countries in the basics like math and science.
gasmonso http://religiousfreaks.com/Windows to this puppy. It probably wouldn't be a big job. Microsoft has lots of tools available for getting Windows CE running in an embedded environment. That would be tres cool - a $100 laptop running Windows! Hey, this is sort of like the FOSS movement returning the favor -- playing a major role in spawning a cheap, standardized hardware platform.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
1: wait for them to be sold commercially for significantly more than $100 http://edition.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/11/17/tu nisia.technology.ap/index.html
or
2: wait for some enterprising thief to steal them in mass from the kids and sell them on Ebay for less than the commercial price. Possibly way less.
So if you don't mind making some little kid cry, you don't ahve to wait long.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Instead of paying minimum wage, pay a higher wage, then look for better people? Let them know you expect work. Hard work. Or they'll be fired, but that you'll pay more (i.e. instead of $6/hour, pay $10/hour).
That way you'll get people who want to make money.
Then hire managers to supervise who enforce these rules. You'll have to pay these guys (and gals) a living wage.
BWAAAA! I haven't wished I had mod points this much in a long time...
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
Check out the pledge to buy one. Although it's looking like the MIT lab won't have any problems getting enough orders to start production, it would be nice to see us comparatively rich /.'ers subsidize these- and maybe develop apps to run on them.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
I wasn't accusing the BBC of Right-Wing Bias or, for that matter Left wing bias. This is just bad reporting.
Two days after Nigeria gives this laptop to their school children 1 million 419 emails appear in everyones email inbox.
And it can display in black and white and color! Thats something my $110 video card can't do!
H!V DRuGZ CHEEP
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
http://www.bnamericas.com/story.jsp?sector=1&idiom a=I¬icia=334597
Govt snubs US$100 laptop program - Argentina, Chile
Published: Thursday, November 3, 2005 17:16 (GMT -0400)
The Chilean government has announced that it will not participate in the "One Laptop Per Child" program being promoted by MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte, regional press reported on Thursday.
While the Argentine government recently committed to purchasing at least half a million of the US$100 computers, the Chilean authorities showed no interest acquiring them.
"The first shipment of these computers will be in either December 2006 and January 2007, so it would be utopian to commit [to buy] a number of computers that do not yet exist," Hugo Martínez, national director of the Chilean government's Enlaces technology program, was quoted as saying by local newspaper supplement Mouse.cl.
"[We also have] questions about their educational use and about the contents and types of interaction that they would produce," said Martínez.
Martínez also put forth an apparently protectionist argument, saying that Negroponte's program "could hurt local vendors if we don't develop a way for the ministry to buy machines that are not distributed by traditional channels."
"In Chile there is a generalized rejection of innovation," countered Tim Delhaes, a local high-tech entrepreneur and general coordinator of open source initiative Viva Firefox. "In eight years of developing tech start-ups it was impossible to get government support for anything if you weren't an already established company," he said.
"The government's decision to not participate in the US$100 laptop initiative almost certainly has to do with intense lobbying by Microsoft and Intel, companies the [Chilean] government has close ties to, because the laptop would use a Linux operating system and AMD chips," said Delhaes.
The Chilean government plans to run a trial program of branded laptops in an unspecified number of schools during 2006, said Enlaces' Martínez, and would be more than happy to share its findings with Negroponte, he added.
By Scott Sadowsky
www.BNamericas.com
Maybe there could be a program where an individual could get one for $200. One machine for yourself and one to be donated to a child. I would gladly pay $200 to get my hand on one of these little laptops.
Five minutes after these kids get these and discover IM, there will open up a massive amount of communication in areas where the unofficial news is limited to word of mouth. There will be too much communication for the government to monitor, and the kids will develop new language faster than the government can fix their language filters (e.g. Think (TM) Microsoft). Repressive regimes will obviously not allow these machines, which means those regimes will be economically irrelevant in a generation. Even religous and political movements that peddle lies to control their members will not be able to survive.
http://www.crnano.org/benefits.htm
I've travelled extensively throughout the 3rd world and with this attitude the program is going to be a disaster "The goal is to provide the machines free of charge to children in poor countries who cannot afford computers of their own,". If you provide them free of charge all of the most abject poor are going to get them and sell them, especially all the children who have hardly enough $ to eat, and many parents would send their children to get them free so they can sell them. It's not nice but it's reality.
Selling cheap stuff as long as they pay for it and cant resell it for a profit isn't such a bad idea however I've generally found that even the poorest people interested in pcs have been able to get a dodgy box to learn and use their skills to get some sort of computer related job.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
For some adults, getting one will seem to be as easy as stealing candy (er, laptop) from a baby. What kind of security/legal/whatever measures will be taken to avoid this?
Or maybe train them for tech support so companies can profit off of obscenely cheap labor.
Deep wracking sobs. Do you think kids will get laptops before or after they get clean water and outdoor plumbing (so they don't have to crap in the field)?
Perhaps the kids will sell their $100 laptop so they can afford to go to grade 5 rather than dropping out. Or maybe the family will just enjoy its extra half-year's income.
This whole scheme is so fucking retarded that it doesn't bear anymore words.
is who these geniuses are who are coming up with these big brother innovations so that we can all go to their house and beat them up.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Have we all become so blind that we completely missed the point. These children need books!
But most importantly, it's not a cell phone.. The best thing that high-tech has given the third world is cell phones. You can get a cell phone connection in almost all third-world cities, where most of the people are. The GSM consortium is trying to push handsets down to $30. The future in the third world is cell phones with Internet access, not vaporware laptops with hand cranks.
"the vision is for children to interact while doing homework, and even share homework tips on a local community scale. "
Haha,
They call them "homework tips" in developing countries? We call them cheat sheats here in the states. These laptops will benefit the kids in more ways then fathomable by a commitee.
I would be more than happy to support this program if the average African person were the ones actually getting the equipment. Unfortunately, it will be stolen by government officials, or corrupt militias. Africa has receied hundred of billions in aid, and yet it remains the porest area in the world. Africa will become prosperous ONLY when the governments and corrupt militias are driven out of power. Unfortunately, Africans get to see another hope vanish while American, Canadian, and European taxpayers get it in the rear once again.
I, for one, welcome our new crank-wielding African pornogapher overlords.
i got ball this is my adress 108 20 37 av corona come n do it iam give u the sidekick so I can hit you wit it
One giant leap for nigerian phishing scams.
The whole point of making them so cheap and giving them out for free, is you are going to flood the market with them.
No one will pay for something every kid in in the country already has. Who would buy them? When there is no market *period*, the black market disappears.
The biggest problem I see with this plan is the garbage produced in 4 years when the new models come out and all the existing hundreds of millions are thrown away. Has anyone thought about that? Are these things recycleable?
We're led to believe, by striking teachers, that education is expensive. Seems to me these devices would be great for those underpriveliged kids the NEA--the teacher's union--claim need the help.
Instead of spending union dues on advertising why such-and-such strike is important (I hear them whenever there's a strike around here) why can't they spend money on projects like this?
I'll go back in hiding now.
the vision is for children to interact while doing homework
And as usual, the greatest use anything can be put to is brainwashing or torturing kids.
I am NOT a number! I am a - oh wait, I'm number 761710. Look! 761710!
have you ever met the head of some non profit organizations before? Alot of them get paied a hefty salary.
-- Yes, I work for the government, and yes I am watching you.
Seriously, let's stop sending patronizing young 20somethings to teach our 'little brown brothers' how to farm or purify water or other essencial things. Maybe the problem isn't that there aren't enough pissant peace corps kids 'teaching' people to do things they only just learned about last week to begin with. Maybe it's not that they don't know how to farm the land or draw a well.
Maybe the problem is that the water is contaminated or too deep and the land isn't good for farming anymore or other geographical features are impediments to these regions recovering. (Some places were once prosperous, but that does not mean that they can be again or soon)
If such is the case, it doesn't matter how much seed or pesticide or fresh water or laptops we send. The technological solution therefore is massive migration of entire populations. This will require enormous building effort in the host country and robust, but cheap transportation for that population.
Regardless, from the comments and the fact that this $100 laptop will not be sold anywhere but the third world I'm inclined to believe that it's not actually a $100 laptop. It's probably a $500 laptop with various donated pieces or government or corporate grants.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
For every one such machine sold at $200 in the more well-off parts of the world, they could give two more laptops away at even half price (or if need be, even another one for free ) to the countries and people otherwise most unlikely to afford them even at $100.
Moreover, I don't see how it makes sense to withhold the machine (despite a focus on open source so strong that it reportedly made them reject even free MacOS) from those who may want to develop for it, "pro bono", without being part of the target audience.
So why in the world would they not sell it to everyone... probably with a less colorful lid - so it would be even more validated (and valued by the students) as something that's useful beyond school, while the green color would make everyone with a diverted "educational edition" look ridiculous at first sight in the early years) from day one?
(And please don't you say: "because it would cannibalize a market for overprized low-end laptops"!)
As of yet, they don't seem to have realized how the restriction to the educational market (and its unnecessary automated enforcement with huge potential for abuse) only add to a problem...
The project also has some big name supporters on board, including Google, and media mogul Rupert Murdoch...
In related news, shares in Fox News fell on the revelation that the Dark Lord, Rupert Murdoch, had involvement in a project will not conveivably forward the cause of Evil.
When asked to comment from atop his firey throne of bronze in the smoldering pits of Gehenna, Lucifer the Evening Star was quoted as saying, "I don't like this. I don't like this at all."
I've heard Negroponte in speeches he's made in India (and he's made a tidy packet doing that sort of thing) and he's given to such "let's solve the digital divide with charity" sort of thinking. While it may sound like a nice thing to say, the devil is in the details. The basic reasons for children lacking access to knowledge infrastructure are not only much about availability of hardware and bandwidth. Social conditions, religious and sectarian dogma, poverty, illiteracy and ignorance of parents that makes educating kids not seem attractive, language barriers and lack of teachers are much bigger hurdles. Without solving at least some of those, handing out laptops is (as another post pointed out) going to result in resales of those laptops or them lying around gathering dust or at best teach those kids to play computer games. For those that are going to scream that we in the west should applaud these and not diss progress in poor countries - I am from South Asia and lived there most of my life till a few months back and I have seen and interacted with enough people that this effort is aimed at to have some idea of what progress would mean for them. Also, consider that since the $100 price is enabled only when these things are manufactured in tens of millions, the project is likely make poor economies dish out large sums to order large numbers of said laptops before any results can be seen. The only guaranteeed winners are going to be manufacturers of these machines (and components in them). Though I don't agree with all that he says, there are some interesting thoughts about this project in this blog http://www.deeshaa.org/2005/11/05/formula-for-milk ing-the-digital-divide
methinks the CTO of this thing, Mary Lou Jespen, should stick to making bovie growth hormone creamer pottery: http://www.joeinc.tv/personal/jepsen/
Yes I would say that you are somewhat wrong (not that it means you're actually wrong, just that my opinion differs). AT least we see the world in very different ways.
:) (yes I know three halves are 150% but then again most environMentalistas try to be larger than life).
i seases/Malaria/Related+Info/MalariaControl.htm and inquire how you might be of service? My point is that in this day and age citizens complaining their governments aren't doing enough are disingenious: the citizens can actually do it themselves for the most part if they organize and cooperate on the specific problem they want adressed or think are insufficiently adressed - and not by making noise and complaining, but by actually doing stuff: contributing money, resources, time and/or knowledge.
:)
Disclaimer: I use "environMentalistas" in a half-joking, half-loving & half-scorning manner - please do not be insulted if you actually are an environMentalista
Here's how I would look at it. The laptops introduce modern technology in an environmently friendly/friendlier way. They open up possibilites for increased cooperation and communication, an increased technological aptitude and extended education (both difficulty and width). It is very important that the laptops are F/OSS both because it acclimatizes the users to F/OSS and because it makes it much easier to actually dwelve into the inner workings of it for those so inclined.
Knowledge is power. Most of the poorer nations are well aware (and have been for at least the last ten years or so) of the importance of free trade and the abolishment or minimizing of import and export tariffs. These nations have actually influenced international policy on this although the EU and especially France is the big stumbeling block (the US has said it will remove it's agricultural subsidies and protections if the EU agrees to do it too - so no uninformed US bashing please). Many poorer african and american nations have made bilateral agreements with the US to great effect (somewhat derailed by the paranoia of Chavez and his ilk) since the EU/France seems to stubbornly cling to their farming practices. Hopefully France and other protectionist EU countries (and the US and the rest of the industrialised world for that matter) will start growing more useful things than food (biodiesel and other fuels) which should allow for drastic cuts in the direct and indirect subsidies (tariffs, price guarantees etc.) no matter what.
Greenhouse gases? I have hope that more and more of those who read science news etc. should be slowly coming around to the insight that we know far too little to claim with any kind of certainty that man plays a major part in climate changes. Anyway, those with the extreme western "environMentalista" view on the environment are often the developing nations worst enemies. I can say that for a very simple reason: energy = prosperity, there's no way around it. And the most cost-efficient portable energy so far is petrolium products (some can be grown of course; look at Brazil), the most cost-efficient non-portable is nuclear energy and hydro-electric dams. "EnvironMentalistas" have a tendency to say a big "No!" to anything at all if they get the chance and are in no way conducive to the kind of society-building that is needed and taking place in most poorer countries. This might all change of course and hopefully so, but imposing stricter rules on developing nations or misleading them into uncertainties are both simply unfair, unreasonable, and probaly not really thought through by those that propose it.
Malaria? I'll leave that to Melinda & Bill Gates, the meager resources I have to support medical science are used otherwise. If you want to fight malaria why don't you go to http://www.gatesfoundation.org/GlobalHealth/Pri_D
So yes I would say you are wrong
this comment is provided "as is" and without any express or implied legibility or congruity [...]
I hate to brake it to you, but only stupid rich people fall for 419 scams.
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
I find it hard to be negative about this at all - maybe I need to read more about it, but it seems very altruistic to me. There are some smart folks behind this, and the individual governments and ministries of education will use their heads as well, probably using care not to just hand them out on streetcorners to passersby. I know that there will someday be photos of one of these laptops that gets used as a doorstop, but I think that there will be many more that will trigger thoughts of "how does this work," and "how can I make this do something that I want it to do?" These are the kind of thoughts that got us all into computers.
It's too bad that Mr. Negroponte's group had to put a statement on their web site saying that "the $100 laptops--not yet in production--will not be available for sale." I think a less tactful person would say, "They're not for you! They're for someone less fortunate than you!"
"Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has proposed a US$54 million program to equip each of his state's 500,000 middle- and high-schoolers with the laptops, which the students would be allowed to keep. Other states may follow suit."
Hey Governor Romney - they're not for you!
The eMate had a 25mhz processor and cost $800 in 1997. It was not really very compatible, except with apple's newton PDA's. Granted there is some similarity, but no, not really comparable.
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
... a Beowulf cluster of these!!!
OK, you can hand crank these things for a minute and that's enough to keep the computer running for 30 minutes. And they automatically form a network with other computers in the same house, via WiFi. And there's no electricity or phonelines to be had anywhere nearby. What's it take to extend the network to the other houses in the village? What's it take to connect this village to the next village? What's the bandwidth per laptop within the house, within the village, and to the outside world? The content of the internet is mostly in the outside world.
In the days when Wired was a must read Negroponte wrote about the 2b1 website, I checked it out and saw there was to be a conference about IT in the developing world, but didnt see Trevor Baylis, the creator on the wind up radio on the invite list, so I got his number (yes he is listed, on Eel Pie Island) and gave him a call, and he got himself invited to the shindig, and the rest is history, and no, this isn't a "wind-up" incase you were wondering :)
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God