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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. "
More info on the $100 laptop, as well as some good pictures, can be found here.
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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
I wasn't accusing the BBC of Right-Wing Bias or, for that matter Left wing bias. This is just bad reporting.