I used to be an advanced amateur photographer before I had kids. The kids were born in the days of film photography. I digitized all my film, and I've been storing all of my pictures in a NAS at home, of which I also keep an off-site backup. I don't worry too much about the possible obsolescence of file formats.

...to force obsolescence and upgrade$

Easy: with DC instead of AC.

It's a fallacious comparison, and a ludicrous insult to the Cuban people who have suffered the opression of a totalitarian regime for more than fifty years.

That's how afraid the Cuban government is of the free flow of ideas.

Exactly where in South America is a war going on? Or did you just make that up, like the rest of your improvised thinking?

It is not. It reverted to Panamanian sovereingty after the Torrijos-Carter treaty in the seventies.

In double-entry accounting (which is the only proper way to do accounting), one entry reduces assets, and the other increases expenses. So they simultaneously "write off" the asset, and "take a hit" to earnings.

Display: any old TV or monitor. Power: micro-USB standardized GSMA Universal Charging Solution. Keyboard and mouse: via USB port. (You'd be surprised at how prevalent TVs and cellphones are in less deveoped parts of the world.) Granted, you can't use the Raspberry Pi away from the power grid, but I would surmise that in areas were there is no electrification, there aren't many teachers or schools, so you can't really make use of the OLPC, either.

The OLPC hardware is too expensive. Even middle-income countries like El Salvador and Honduras have struggled to get them introduced into schools. The Raspberry Pi project ("An ARM GNU/Linux box for $25" - http://www.raspberrypi.org/) might just obsolete OLPC.

Another part of the problem is that the music industry needs oligopoly rents in order to sustain the expensive lifestyles of its executives and entertainers.