[geeks] $100 One Laptop Per Child - grist for the mill

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Sat, 18 Nov 2006 @ 22:22 -0500, Patrick Giagnocavo said:

> On Nov 18, 2006, at 7:12 PM, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> 
> > William Kirkland wrote
> >> The difficulty here is that those people have more basic needs which
> >> must be addressed before providing inexpensive laptops becomes useful.
> >
> > Yeah.  $100 laptops, let alone satellite MP3 servers, are putting the
> > cart so far before the horse that the horse can't even see the cart.
> > The server's no use without the laptops, and for the price of the 
> > server
> > and those laptops they could have treadmill-powered generators, water
> > pumps, UV water sterilization systems to eliminate parasites and
> > bacteria from their drinking water....
> >
> 
> No offense, but you know, there are cities in Africa where there is a 
> fledgling middle class and some entrepreneurs, and a smallish 
> professional class too.

Yes, and those cities were not built by giving the people raw
information or tools and leaving them to it.

They were built by teaching the people up close and in person how to do
it.

*ALL* civilizations evolve like that.

-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["We have nothing to prove" -- Alan Dawkins]