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On Mon, 12 Nov 2007, Jonathan King wrote:
On 11/12/07, Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
On Mon, 12 Nov 2007, Mark Rages wrote:
There are a lot of cool ideas in the OLPC laptop:
http://bc.tech.coop/blog/071112.html
Amazing -- it really exists now and is on sale? Why does the program
last for only two weeks??! I'll have to think about it.
My wife's family is in Quito, Ecuador, and they are all quite poor by
our standards. All of her nieces and nephews could use these laptops.
To pay $400 each is a little steep, but if I could get them for $200
apiece, I might just buy a dozen and have them shipped directly to
Quito.
But you see, Mike, this doesn't fit in with the Grand Plan, so as far as
I know your idea, however generous and noble, won't fly with them. Sure,
it would do tons of good to get a dozen of these into Ecuador to people
you care about, but that's just not what they have in mind. I hope they
will come around. Not so long ago, they completely denied that it would
be a good idea to let anybody state-side have them at all. They've
relented there, but I am still a bit worried about how this will work
out.
I can see why it is a tricky problem from their perspective. I could work
out scams like this: I'll pay $200 each to ship to Ecuador, but in
Ecuador, they'll pay $100 to ship them back to me and I'll send them $200
in exchange. Then I'll sell them here on Ebay for $300 -- everyone makes
money but the poor kids lose. That would be a nefarious scheme, but I
would not put it past some people.
They claim to have a way of making stolen laptops turn off forever, but I
guess that means that the kid has a passcode? Not sure of the scheme.
But if it is a passcode, just hold a knife to the kid's neck, get the
passcode and steal the computer. We need to have good ways of protecting
kids from this kind of thing. Maybe saturating regions with these
computers will be the way to go -- if they are all over the place, there
will be less temptation to steal them.
Mike
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