But these news outfits all want to be that market maker. Like TFA says, its all about building brand image as the trusted source. Right now, people trust Google, not the media outlets. There are two problems (from the POV of 'old media') with this situation:

• Brand loyalty is worth a premium over the commodity value of the product. People are willing to pay a bit more to buy the brand name cereal than the generic stuff.
• That brand loyalty and trust can be sold to interest groups. Its why well known actors and personalities make adverts for products. Old Media used to deliver eyeballs. They could sell a block of consumers and the trust those consumers placed in the new anchor was transferred to the advertisements.

Google undermines loyalty. People can bounce around between any site for their news. And the trust that people used to put in their chosen source is now given to Google.

The OLPC needs to be coupled with software that gives children a basic education with little or no teacher assistance.

This is the fantasy that sank OLPC the first time around.

Every culture has its own educational tradition. Its own theory of how children should be taught,what they should be taught, and by who they should be taught.

There are gatekeepers, secular and religious.

"No" means "no." No purchase orders. No deployment. No support. No protection.

You can't work openly.

You can't work secretly without someone paying the ultimate price.

"If you educate a boy, you educate an individual; but if you educate a girl, you educate a community. No other factor even comes close to matching the cascade of positive changes triggered by teaching a single girl how to read and write." Stones Into Schools

Taliban bomb schools in NW Pakistan

The geek will blithely hand the Afghan girl a lime-green laptop that can never be openly carried or displayed.

It would be suicidal even to speak of it to a stranger.

The girl is illiterate, like her sisters, her mother, her grandmother.

True literacy implies a basic understanding of all forms of communication. The girl needs to learn how to see. The girl needs to learn how to hear.

The girl needs a teacher. She needs a school - a defensible space in which to learn.

 

That does bring up a good point. How does one explicitly know they are breaking copyright law while on the internet. I could click a link that someone says is their own original music, I download it, start playing it, and THEN find out it is a work that is protected under copyright. The very nature of the net allows you to accidentally break all sorts of copyright laws based on what people put on their sites. If someone put the whole text to harry potter on a html page, maybe even in a comment so you don't notice, bam, you have just copied the book to your computers memory. This does not only apply to German law. This could apply to any place that has copyright laws.

Essentially your computer system is committing the copyright infringement, not you. I know cases like this would be rare and most infringement is intentional, but how do you know? I could potentially have tons of copyright protected pictures I downloaded off sites that offered them free, and I have no way of knowing if some artist owns them + your computer makes copies the cache automatically, so if you have ever browsed to a site with copyrighted pics, you have broken the law, right?

I tought in collecting around as much children books i could for that same target, there is a lot of books that enjoyed as child that are public domain by now and would be great to be easily available for all those children, but wasnt so trivial to find them in spanish.

Probably the initial target should be focus (o at least, discriminate or categorize) on books for children, and preferably in spanish (as probably is the language of the countries where has been more widely deployed so far, they are pointing to Uruguay, but i think is being deployed or tested in more countries of south america by now, and in far bigger numbers than in i.e. africa or asia).

And if well PDF is "good enough", for flexibility (as in looks as good in both screen orientations), speed for download and size that would be using in the device will be great to have most of them in HTML or another format with a good reader already included in the XO (or that could be easily included, i think there are at least one activity for it that read ePub format already)

That's it really.

The paper is better because it's verifiable, and does not require trusting enabling technology to run an election. No electronic system meets this criteria, unless it's voting record is written to physical media in a human readable, enduring way. So then, why bother?

Doing it with paper gets people involved in their civics too.

I'll give them top marks for open source, but a FAIL for it just not being a necessary thing.

Well, it could be used to determine the extent of the infringement. I.e. How *many* people actually benefited from the infringer's distribution.

Honestly, I have not noticed this trend at all. This is the first instance, in fact.