After the green book, Qadhafi launches the green laptop:
With the project scheduled to be completed by June 2008, Libya could become the first nation in which all school-age children are connected to the internet through educational computers, Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the One Laptop per Child project, told the The New York Times on Wednesday.
The $250 million deal, reached on Tuesday, would provide the nation with 1.2 million computers, a server in each school, a team of technical advisers, satellite internet service and other infrastructure.
The One Laptop per Child project, which has the support of the United Nations Development Programme, aims to provide laptops to school-aged children worldwide for about $100 each. It has reached tentative purchase agreements with Argentina, Brazil, Nigeria and Thailand.
I like anything with cranks. I wish my Powerbook had a crank for those long flights. But, while this idea sounds just fine, perhaps Muammar Qadhafi will then, I don’t know, allow freedom of speech in his country so that people can use those laptops to start blogs? Just a thought.
(I have been thinking of starting a sub-blog to follow Middle East related technology and science news. Especially focused on technology that’s especially helpful in this region, for whatever reason. Is anyone interested? And yes, I’m a geek.)
Hey! I havea blog and I’m in Libya. There are lots of Libyan bloggers.
yaaaaay for mideast geek blog (eh or was it tech blog?)
I’d be totally down for a technology blog. I think there is a huge lack of awareness of scientific developments in the Middle East. If you could get a few actual scientists from various fields on, that would be awesome.
If you expanded it to geekdom generally, then you could talk about extremely important topics like Battlestar Galactica.
This OLPC project was actually slated for Egypt as well. It doesn’t seem to have gotten off the ground yet though. It’s a nice idea but there are serious serious flaws in the thinking. I wrote a piece on this back in April – http://contactegypt.blogspot.com/2006/04/100-laptop-in-egypt-development-or.html
OK Rashad, here’s a little piece of Battlestar Galactica trivia I uncovered towards the end of Season 2: when they discover “New Caprica”, the planet hidden in some space anomaly that they think the Xylons won’t find, Dr. Baltar is seen looking at map of the landing site on a big screen. I think it looks remarkably like the Egyptian delta. And I think overall, the Greek/Egyptian ethos of the Colonies’ religion and culture fits in with a standard “the Ancient Egyptians were space aliens” or from Atlantis type of sci-fi mythology.
Alaa, Rashad and anyone else interested we should talk about this tech blog mideast. I can do mac stuff, and I’m interested in usability in the Middle East (where mac stuff is very expensive and you deal with some specific problems, like the fact that the only decent Arabic word processor is Israeli, etc.) What i’m really interested is how technology can be used practically in this region — for instance dealing with the dust in cairo, sandproofing cameras etc. during trips to the desert, and so on. I’m end-user oriented. Of course open source / Linux stuff is interesting, but is probably already covered by the EGLUG people in detail, no?
I would be interested in a mid east technology and science blog. pleaes let me know if you create one.
Jeff, I think the main thing holding it back in Egypt is Microsoft. They are working on their own cheap laptop initative that would of course not be open source. They have a ton of influence with the Egyptian government because of their huge presence here and all the work they do in public-private partnerships.
[puts hand up]
Me for a Mid East techie blog. You could write about Iran’s stem-cell program…
Correct me if I’m wrong, but while these are computers, they are not necessarily delivered with internet access. They will enable ad hoc/mesh wireless networks of people to communicate with themselves over potentially long distances, but not necessarily connect to the internet at large through them. This means that, among other things, that blogging wouldn’t exactly be something that you could do with this.
That’s not to degrade this project; I think it’s one of the most important projects in history so far.
As for the freedom of speech bit, in some places it’s believed that giving many people access to mass-communication devices like these laptops provide means certain-death for regeimes that do not provide freedom to their citizenry. I don’t know very much about libya, but if it’s government thinks it can control a nation of well connected, technically sophisticated people, they probably have another thought coming.