[lug] One laptop per child

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Fri, 2006-12-01 at 17:58 -0700, dio2002 at indra.com wrote:
> If you had a chance to have a clean water or a laptop which would you choose?

Would I choose to drink today or learn to have clean water everyday?
Knowledge is power.

> If you had a chance to have all your rights taken away or a laptop which
> would you choose?

This must be misspoken, since if I choose the laptop I'd still have my
rights which doesn't seem to be the point your making.  Assuming you
mean "you can have your rights OR your laptop", then I don't see how
having one precludes having the other.

> If you were living in the middle of a military zone would you choose a
> laptop over peace?

Ditto.  You presume that the resources spent in providing easy access to
knowledge could be used to provide peace instead.  I don't see that as
likely.  There are plenty of places in this world with both laptops and
peace.  And there is nothing that can correlate the resources required
to have both, so there is no reason to think instead of a laptop you'll
get peace.  You're just as likely to not have the laptop and still not
have peace.

OLPC tries to bring knowledge to a world where the lack of it keeps
children and their families prisoners of poverty and despots.  Is that
such a bad idea?  Should we wait for clean water and peace before we try
to bring knowledge of how to keep these things for longer than a day?

IMHO, I don't think so.
-- 
Michael J. Hammel           |
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org  |  Books we'll never see:
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