Some sad news regarding the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project: Microsoft has joined forces with the developers of the "$100 laptop" to make Windows available on the machines. According to Wired, Microsoft has had their sights on emerging markets in developing countries for a while now and have viewed low-cost children's ...

From the conclusion of Chopra & Dexter's (2007, p173) Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software: Jacques Ellul imagined an iron cage constructed of technology (Ellul 1967), but never the possibility that the cage could be unlocked by its prisoners. We began with a historical note on hacking: ...

From John Dewey's "The School and Society," pp100: It was forgotten that the maximum appeal, and the full meaning in the life of the child, could be secured only when the studies were presented, not as bare external studies, but from the standpoint of the relation they bear to the life ...

via secrecy news: The Government Accountability Office maintains an office at the National Security Agency but it remains unused since no one in Congress has asked GAO to perform any oversight of the Agency, the head of GAO disclosed last week. Despite multi-billion dollar acquisition failures at NSA and the Agency’s controversial, ...

"The corporations want us to have experiences only through their products." -- Statement of Belief

"The line between state and society is not the perimeter of an intrinsic entity that can be thought of as a freestanding object or actor. It is a line drawn internally, within the network of institutional mechanisms through which a certain social and political order is maintained." :: sent wirelessly via ...

"To search the web by location, delivering regionally pertinent information to users and regionally pertinent users to advertisers." - Jonathon Keats, Wired 15.09 :: sent wirelessly via blackberry

"I believe that technology and culture constitute each other, studying the actors and actants that make up our lively, troubling and productive technologies tells me about the actors and actants that make up our culture." :: sent wirelessly via blackberry

While reading Walter Lippmann's "A Preface to Politics" my attention was mainly drawn to his discussion of the red herring. The red herring -- a metaphor used to describe the obfuscation of, or distraction from, a particular object(ive) -- is portrayed by Lippmann (1913, p261) as both "pest" and "benefit," ...

"It is precisely the alteration of nature by men, not nature as such, which is the most essential and immediate basis of human thought." :: sent wirelessly via blackberry