While MIT has been racing to design the world’s first $100 computer, India has performed an end-run at a third the price, and it’s a tablet no less. Running with open-source software, as genuine volks-werks will, the iNDIAPAD will reach third world schoolchildren for $35, developers at the India Institute of Science hope even as low as $10. Absent keypad and hand crank, but with camera, touchscreen and wireless. Which begs the question of course, what indispensable features drive Apple prices? Bill Gates earned his fortune on them. Patents.
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They’ve been buying up scrap computers lately. More have been unceremoniously dumped there, a toxic waste dump that’s too dangerous to be near an American population of 50,000 fits in perfectly with an Indian population center of 5 million or more.
And of course they need to be grateful for that 2 cents per week that each of the nearby peasants would get, if they’re even paid at all, for having it stored near them.
I was told just yester-even, in jest of course, that the Chinese and India “steal” our technology. Steals ASS… we dump it on their doorstep and tell them to do something with it.
Heheehee… they’re doing something with it alright. Teach the people how to disassemble a computer and you also teach them to assemble it. Pay them 25 cents a day to solder chipsets onto PC boards and guess what, they’ll rise up and bite Intel on their collective arse.
The old fashioned Socialist way.
I should also point out that the university system WE have is THEIR invention, Persian actually. From a time when the Persian Empire was Big Boss Daddy and actually ran huge chunks of the Subcontinent. The digital Decimal Notation of numbers, including the “arabic” numerals we use, the exact characters 1 2 3 4 5 6
78 9 and the ALL IMPORTANT 0 have been found on temple-structures dating back before the time of the Romans and Christ. Public education, public libraries, all Indo-Persian inventions. The Romans at the time were counting on their fingers with that IVXDCM crap. The Binary Digit counting system of 0 and 1 was also invented in Indo-Persia.The whole notions of Archiving (libraries) and the base of computer science itself was NOT modern and NOT anywhere near being a Euro-American invention. The Chinese use a digital computer made out of beads and wire and have been for an equal amount of time. (hey, it’s 5 a.m. so I’m allowed a fuzzy sentence or two, M’kay?)
That’s a short explanation of the earlier comment. Every time I hear the phrase “THEY (meaning an obviously inferior race because they have dark skin and or spell their names funny) stole that technology from US”. It was used to barbecue two Jewish scientists in Good Ol’ Enlightened America, burned at the stake. For allegedly helping the Russians “steal” something that wasn’t even an American innovation. The “American” nuclear projects were put together from Prior Art (existing technology) by mostly Foreign born and Foreign Educated scientists and engineers who were in America from a coincidence of War. Many of them were of Arabian extraction, Jewish in other word. (c’mon, indulge me, what’s that said at Seder “my father was a wandering Arabian”, right?)
The German scientists at Peenemunde who developed rocketry to such a high level, most of them came West instead of East. Where they were interned at White Sands/Ft Bliss. Surprisingly the Russians achieved orbit before us. Was it they “stole” technology which hadn’t even been perfected in America by Foreign Scientists yet? Did the Germans “steal” the Atomic Bomb secrets and were in a position to develop it faster than the “American” foreign born and MOST IMPORTANTLY Foreign EDUCATED scientists? According to OSS now CIA propaganda the only thing that stopped them was British and Norwegian intelligence and resistance agents managed to disrupt the supply of “heavy water”, water with the H part of the H2O being Deuterium, an isotope with an extra particle.
For those who didn’t catch the pattern, that’s not a prime ingredient in an atomic Fission bomb.. but a Thermonuclear Fusion bomb, an “H” bomb. The “H” meaning the deuterium isotope of Hydrogen.
OOPS. Seems the Germans were not only ahead of us on the A-bomb they were working on the H-bomb. Using technologies developed in European universities.
Is it not possible that some of the OTHER scientists also educated at say, Heidlberg, hmmm? might have been Russian?
But American public opinion must prevail, and the Rosenbergs must have helped the “backwards” Ruskies steal the project.
It helps too, in defining how AMD, Intel’s biggest rival in making chipsets, and now based in in in India, routinely skunks Intel and IBM. That “root for the home team” bit doesn’t EVEN faze me at all. Nope.
And it helps to understand how the (socialized) people and government of India can beat us to the punch on this particular innovation.