OLPC good start, but no match for survival

OLPC, One Laptop Per Child aims to bring affordable, durable, and connected laptops to children in undeveloped countries. The goal is that by introducing these connected laptops to children they will "learn to learn" and this will increase their drive to learn and connect with the rest of the world . This will cause the ability they have to change their world and help their countries develop faster and more thoroughly.

My question was, "are the OLPC laptops going to waste in certain areas because there is just no time to use them?" Apparently OLPC has done research to find areas that are not so underdeveloped that the citizens are still competing with nature for the entire day. This means that the children who are able to use these laptops are actually getting chances to use them instead of having to deal with food, shelter, and survival. Because let's face it, this

thinking machine

Does not take priority over this

Killing Machine

All jokes aside OLPC is making a great effort to increase the knowledge of children world wide. The old method of establishing schools and finding teachers does not seem to stand up well to the more dire situations of some undeveloped regions. Plus, the laptop is pretty cool.

Apple breaks new ground, but not really

Apple is making these announcements about a new product they are producing called the Apple Tablet. Apple is concerned that if it releases this new product will there be people and companies that will want to produce Apps for it. Seems like a really dumb concern but if I think really hard about it, the concern does not get any less dumb. I'm sure some Apple tech geek is sitting in his cramped cubicle screaming that the incentive to create Apps for this love child of his will be directly related to the success of the thing

"listen to me!!!"

However, why wouldn't this become an incredibly popular product? Its ground breaking, it offers more processing power and a bigger screen than an iPhone. Except, its really not ground breaking. All of the basic parts already come along with the iPhone albeit in a smaller size (pocket to be precise). The Tablet is a touch screen product similar to a laptop, well actually, it IS a laptop.

looks like a laptop to me, or at least the screen

Now Apple has a problem. I'm no market analyst or computer guru, but it seems to me that if you are going to release a laptop sized, laptop shaped, and laptop looking product, you might as well sell the thing as a laptop, because honestly, if that could play some of my favorite games, I would want one...badly. Being able to type , browse, play, blog, and all that awesome computer jazz through touch would be awkward at first but would give, at least me, a great sense of control.

One company has promised to help create Apps for the Tablet. A company called Appcelerator(clever) created operating systems and the like to help others produce Apps for various products. So at least the option will be there for Apps, but I think Apple would be better minded to advertise the Tablet as a touch screen laptop with all the laptop bits and pieces.

Hilary Clinton wears the pants on Internet freedom

I love how politicians are able to spit in the faces of their opponents and really any one they disagree with and do it without mentioning any names...very tactful. Anyway, the politician I am talking about is Hillary Clinton with her now famous Global Internet Freedom Speech. She basically called China out on its censorship of Google, which was pretty clever because she was able to do it without saying China or fascism or communist. However, it appears that the Chinese government is not that dumb because they released a statement saying that relationships between China and the US have declined because the US is trying to impose its "information imperialism" on Chinese citizens. This statement amused me to the point of confusion, therefore I Googled imperialism to make sure I was reading that correctly.

Imperialism : The policy of extending a nation's authority by territorial acquisition or by the establishment of economic and political hegemony over other nations.

Information and imperialism are two words that DO NOT go together. Information is something that every nation wants and that is eagerly sought by everyone. So how can anyone impose information imperialism? It seems to me that China is living in the past and is desperately trying to cling to the idea that it is possible and acceptable to censor information to its citizens. Even if they manage to to censor a person for most of their lives, with the interconnectedness of the world market these days it is almost impossible for a Chinese citizen to leave the country on work and completely avoid the wealth of information that awaits them just outside of Communist China's borders.

microsoft makes up for its screw up

I just read about how Microsoft decided to fix the Internet Explorer flaw that allowed the Chinese hackers to make an attempt at stealing user information. They say that they have patched the update that will fix the flaw which should stop hackers from being able to exploit it in order to plant viruses and malicious programs in websites or emails. This brings me to the point that Microsoft seems to screw up often with the first few iterations of their software. It was even suggested to me that I should wait until Microsoft releases its first service pack for Windows 7 before I try to switch over from Vista. I understand that the first of anything is usually much less crisp than the things that follow but with a processing monster like Microsoft I would expect security and accessibility to be two things that are as close to perfect as possible upon the release of new software. According to the article any one who has the automatic updates authorized on their computer will have already received the update and therefore will not have to worry about the patch, which is nice to know since I would hate to do work to make up for Microsoft's screw ups.

Internet and the Dark Age?

So, I am sitting here wondering what to write about for my second blog post and my girlfriend decides to start telling me about this book she is reading written by Maggie Jackson. Apparently it is a book about how the internet and social media are eroding our attention spans and causing us to lose the ability to become intimately focused. Without this "intimate focus" progress will grind to a halt and the entire world will enter a new dark age because none of us will be able to focus. Now it sounds to me like Maggie Jackson is an old fart who managed to get her hands on too much negatively biased information about the internet and modern children. I would like to point out to Miss Jackson that the reason she can write, publish, and actually sell her profound disgrace of a book is because the people with the short attention spans have mastery over the internet. But immaturity aside, I feel that Miss Jackson is one of those people of yesteryear who is fretting about the condition of the planet it's people because the people are different from the way she is used to. I used my reader and came across this interesting article about how our generation is actually kinder and more considerate that the older generations. As for Miss Jackson I am only giving the link to the brief summary contained on the backside of her book.

Well, I tried valiantly to post a video conversation but after 4 hours of a perpetual "uploading" message I caved and decided to close the window. I want to talk about the Google vs China topic we read about. I noticed that while we were reading and talking about it we all immediately assumed that it was the Chinese government. However, I think I read in a "Popular Science" that while the Chinese government certainly undertakes those crafty cyber attacks it is more often a small group of elite civilian hackers who consider themselves ultra nationalists. I feel like this situation marks an interesting change in the business world. Google is deciding that it will either release an uncensored version of Google or pull out from China completely. This will most likely be a very short termed change, but it is a notable change. A big business has flown in the face of a profit at any cost to enforce a moral code. Hopefully other corporations catch the wave.