he United States is not some podunk little nation like Korea, but a continent-spanning nation that takes 3 days to drive across,

Which is exactly why it makes sense to have the government work on a broadband project. A similar thing happened with electricity and phones. It wasn't viable for businesses to install the lines so the government took over and installed them out to the remote countryside.

I hope the power grid gets reworked in all of the stimulus, we need that a lot. But having higher broadband penetration will be a good thing too.

I agree, but it isn't an either/or situation most of the time. There are plenty of kids out there that have enough to eat but don't have a way to get a education.

You switch from "will it help" to "best way to help" in mid-point.

I certainly did.

Well, there's also Newton's Principia and all of Shakespeare.

That shit never goes out of style.

Darn it, I had this long and awesomely combative response to your response(to my response to your response, etc.) that totally would have garnered some good karma(I totally dropped some awesomely pertinent stats about Nigeria and cell phones as well). But after thinking about it, it was probably not the best response.

Here's the thing, yes we in the US have problems with the textbook publishing industry, and yes there are problems with the implementation of computer networks, but the question is not whether or not the OLPC project can solve the educational problems of the world but whether it can be useful in certain situations. I think the answer is yes. There are areas that need resources devoted to food and to sanitation and to other important thing in that vein, but there are also communities that have a minimal standard of living which could be increased by the introduction of the OLPC. That's my point, not that this is some utopian cure-all, but that it will be useful for some communities and that this is the best way to help those communities.

Are there communities out there that would be helped more by books than these laptops, sure there are. And some of those communities will get these laptops anyway, but shit happens.

If you are politically correct and environmentally conscious, you are probably now wiping your ass with the toilet paper made from these perfectly usable books.

I doubt it, glossy paper doesn't recycle like that.

Wow, are you in any way involved with pedagogical theory? Do you actually know anything about how children learn? Are you doing anything other than assuming that elementary school learning in other countries is somehow just a poorly funded version of the U.S.?

Printing a whole ton of elementary school primers in Swahili, or Maya(yes people still speak it), or any other language that has a limited amount of speakers compared to English is a resource consuming endeavor. To be able to simply write it and have it show up on their computers allows them to have much more content available than if they were stuck hauling books into every school.

As for the wireless network, that's been built into the computer as a mesh network, which means that one child, or a teacher, can connect to someone who has the latest version of a textbook, or even a text that was not available to them prior.

And while you may want to pretend that civil war tears through every "third-world nation" on a regular basis, that simply isn't the case; and certainly not on a level that causes massive infrastructure damage.

The problem with University books, and it is a problem, I know, I've been there, I'm bitter about it too, has nothing to do with this project. This is about providing a different sort of education.

Ultimately this has a broader goal as well, providing the tools for people who have as yet not had them to develop a level of computer literacy that will allow them to have a level of knowledge on par, if not better than, the modern information powers. There is no good way to get an education on how to use computers than by using them, especially at a young age. I imagine that is how most people here on slashdot learned to use the things.

And how many pads of paper, pencils and books does it take to download up to date information from the internet?

This way the children in question aren't stuck with crappy out-of-date textbooks three, four, however many years down the line.

Oh, sorry, I thought you were reasonable. I didn't realize you were a libertarian.

Obama is not a socialist, not even close. I should know, I am one.

I'm sorry, but it isn't to get them not to vote. It does has the effect of marginally less people voting, and I think it sucks, but the point is to get people to vote Democrat, not to abstain from voting.

And sorry, but Nader isn't a Green any more, he is doing as much damage to third parties as is the Democratic Party, more, probably.

Let's make perfectly clear that Nader is not Green any more. He abuses the system as much as the Dems do to get on the ballot. If he was trying to get a third party on the ballot then he wouldn't have fucked the Greens like he did in 2004 and 2008 by running as a green until he lost the national nomination the running as an independent.

I'm certainly not going to defend the Democrats election tactics against the Greens. I've been in plenty of campaigns that were targeted by them. I don't know how many states they sued Nader in, I can't seem to find it for this election, it was 20 in the last one.

No they aren't both forms of voter suppression. One is voter suppression, the other is legal wrangling. The whole idea of getting Nader off the ballot is to get those people to vote Dem, not to get them not to vote. Again, I'm not saying that the Dems should be doing this, just that it isn't the same as voter suppression. Republican voter suppression hits Green supporters as well.

That is only true if the size of the popular vote win doesn't matter, but it does matter. Obama won by a fair amount of both the popular vote and the electoral vote, but he could have won by the same amount of the electoral vote and a far greater amount of the popular vote. A large popular vote has significant effect in political capital after inauguration. Had the pop vote been closer Obama would have had a harder time once he took office, were it greater he would have had a much easier time.

So, yes, those votes do in fact count, though not directly towards the election.

I should add:

Obama being from Chicago and all, every time I saw one of the Obama "Vote Early" signs, I unintentionally mentally appended "Vote Often" to it.

And I voted for the guy, though neither early nor often.

And ATMs.