Wow, this terrorism stuff is scary. Kudos to the British authorities for doing a job well done. That said, isn’t this a little overboard?
IHT:
In Britain, the authorities banned laptop computers, mobile phones, iPod music players, and other electronic devices from being carried on board; passengers were obliged to empty their remaining carry-on items into the plastic bags.
HRD contends that spending Rs 450 crore on digital empowerment can be better spent on primary and secondary education. “It is quite obvious that the financial expenditure to be made on the scheme will be out of public funds.
It would be impossible to justify an expenditure of this scale on a debatable scheme when public funds continue to be in inadequate supply for well-established needs listed in different policy documents,” the ministry said.
It also finds it intriguing as to “why no developed country has been chosen” for MIT’s OLPC experiment “given the fact that most of the developed world is far from universalising the possession and use of laptops among children of 6-12 age group”.
Wow, I feel somewhat vindicated.
[Hat tip: Glenn Fleishman]
The so-called Principality of Sealand, seven miles off the coast of Felixstowe and Harwich, was evacuated at lunchtime yesterdayafter a generator caught fire. Thames Coastguard, Harwich RNLI lifeboat, Felixstowe Coastguard rescue teams, firefighting tug Brightwell, the RAF rescue helicopter from Wattisham and 15 Suffolk based firefighters from the National Maritime Incident Response Group (MIRG) were all called into action to tackle the blaze.
One man, believed to be a security guard, was airlifted from the scene and taken to Ipswich Hospital with smoke inhalation but no one else was on the Second World War gun emplacement.
[via Boing Boing]
PREVIOUSLY: E Mare Libertas; November 3, 2005
Clive Thompson is at it again — this time he’s just penned a long piece on Google in China for The New York Times Magazine:
It was difficult for me to know exactly how [Kai-Fu Lee, head of operations for Google in China] felt about the company’s arrangement with China’s authoritarian leadership. As a condition of our meeting, Google had demanded that I not raise the issue of government relations; only the executives in Google’s California head office were allowed to discuss those matters. But as Lee and I talked about how the Internet was transforming China, he offered one opinion that seemed telling: the Chinese students he meets and employs, Lee said, do not hunger for democracy. “People are actually quite free to talk about the subject,” he added, meaning democracy and human rights in China. “I don’t think they care that much. I think people would say: ‘Hey, U.S. democracy, that’s a good form of government. Chinese government, good and stable, that’s a good form of government. Whatever, as long as I get to go to my favorite Web site, see my friends, live happily.’ ” Certainly, he said, the idea of personal expression, of speaking out publicly, had become vastly more popular among young Chinese as the Internet had grown and as blogging and online chat had become widespread. “But I don’t think of this as a political statement at all,” Lee said. “I think it’s more people finding that they can express themselves and be heard, and they love to keep doing that.”
It sounded to me like company spin — a curiously deflated notion of free speech. But spend some time among China’s nascent class of Internet users, as I have these past months, and you begin to hear such talk somewhat differently. Youth + freedom + equality + don’t be evil is an equation with few constants and many possible solutions. What is freedom, just now, to the Chinese? Are there gradations of censorship, better and worse ways to limit information? In America, that seems like an intolerable question — the end of the conversation. But in China, as Google has discovered, it is just the beginning.
In journo-speak that means that The World isn’t airing it. It happens all the time, but it still sucks.
They were kind enough to provide me with the mixed version of it, as it would have aired.
You can listen to it here.
Here’s the intro, that would have been read by the show’s host:
Over the last few years, wireless Internet access, known as WiFi, has become more and more widespread. Various cities, ranging from Philadelphia to Paris are currently building citywide WiFi networks. There are other efforts to wirelessly connect whole countries as well, like in Macedonia and Estonia. But each country’s path is different. Cyrus Farivar reports.
Wow, my friends are just all over the place lately. Tom Grove just had his first piece published in Wired magazine, in the January issue! It’s about selling satellite dishes in Turkish Kurdistan:
Mustafa Özgen’s borrowed Ford Turbo bumps along a Turkish dirt road, 13 miles from the border with Syria. Özgen rumbles past dilapidated houses, abandoned during the country’s prolonged war with Kurdish separatists. In the back of his truck, satellite TV dishes are stacked neatly on their sides like silverware in a drawer. Özgen, a Kurd, is making the three-and-a half-hour journey to the village of Kocyigit. But he doesn’t use its Turkish name; he insists on the Kurdish appellation, Rosat. Feelings are still a bit raw in southeastern Turkey.
Well done, Tom!
Potential computer users in the developing world will not want a basic $100 hand-cranked laptop due to be rolled out to millions, according to Craig Barrett, ECO of Intel.
Schoolchildren in Brazil, Thailand, Egypt and Nigeria will begin receiving the first few million textbook style computers from the MIT Media Lab run by Nicholas Negroponte from early 2006.
“Mr. Negroponte has called it a $100 laptop — I think a more realistic title should be ‘the $100 gadget’,” Barrett, chairman of the world’s largest chipmaker, told a press conference in Sri Lanka on Friday. “The problem is that gadgets have not been successful.”
Yesterday, I was perusing the site of IDG, the parent company of my employer, Macworld and I found this line:
From our name to our presence today in 85 countries and on all 7 continents, IDG is truly a global company.
7 continents? Does IDG have an Antarctica bureau that I’m not aware of?
I posed the question to my co-workers and Paul Boutin. He and my boss’ boss, Jason Snell, came up with the same answer:
Except that the bureau is actually in Australia, so I’m not sure that counts. Still cool though. Really cool. 😉
I know that one should not ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained as stupidity. Not everyone involved in the “laptop for every child†is motivated by greed; some are motivated by a zeal that comes from an inability to figure out what the problem is and how it can be most effectively solved. The operative word is “effectively.†You can always use a cannon where a fly-swatter is sufficient. But for the cost of a cannon, you can get a million fly-swatters which will be more effective than one cannon. Cannons are more impressive then fly-swatters, however, and that may explain their fascination with some people.
A blackboard and chalk is not as sexy as a laptop. In fact, a TV and a media player is pretty much all the hardware that you need to provide basic education to a village full of children. That hardware (and some free software) would cost all of $200 a year, and if you pay about $2000 a year as salaries to a couple of village school teachers, you can educate a 100 kids for about $20 per child per year. Compare that to just buying $100 laptops for each kid.
A thought in response to your Slate article and the more practical Inveneo stuff. The latter relies on 12V DC for the good reasons that it’s been made ubiquitous by the car and truck industry, the gear is simple and tough, and big economies of scale have already been made. Why then does every new DC gadget call for a different voltage and its own transformer? Big purchasers like the Pentagon or the Indian government could push the industry towards standardisation just by insisting on 12V. Find a vehicle and plug it in.
Yours,
James Wimberley
Caleta de Vélez , Spain
