And the winner* is…

(www.drudgereport.com)

What If Every Child Had A Laptop?

Lesley Stahl Reports On The Dream And The Difficulties Of Getting A Computer To Every Child

By Lesley Stahl
60 Minutes
(CBS) This segment was originally broadcast on May 20, 2007.
It was updated on Nov. 30, 2007.
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There’s a new laptop on the market that’s being snapped up by parents looking for a unique holiday gift for their kids. It’s only $200, and it isn’t like any computer you’ve ever seen. But there’s a catch: in order to buy one for your child, you also have to buy one for a child in a poor country.

And that was the whole point behind these new laptops: to get them to kids in the most impoverished places, so they can become educated and part of the modern world.

As correspondent Lesley Stahl first reported last spring, the laptop, called the XO, was the brainchild of Nicholas Negroponte, a professor at MIT.

Two years ago he founded a non-profit organization called “One Laptop Per Child,” through which he recruited a cadre of geeks to design a low-cost computer specifically for poor children.

Negroponte had a dream, a big one: that every child on the planet have a laptop, and along with it, the possibility of a better future.

Negroponte’s dream was born in Cambodia.

Click here for the full video segment

The Future of Affordable Ultraportable Laptops

By Ross Rubin
For Engadget.com
May 6, 2008
Click here for the original story
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Because of their design and low to non-existent software costs, ultraportable laptops like the Asus Eee PC (pictured top-left) are available for as low as $300 which includes a 7″ LCD screen, built-in webcam, wireless internet, three USB ports and the fully loaded OpenOffice.org suite.

The US smartphone market may continue to be dominated by mobile platforms from Apple, Microsoft, and RIM, but Linux has been creeping into ever more mobile devices in the last few years. Some Motorola RAZR 2 models have donned a Tux, Palm is looking to Linux to drive its next-generation consumer smartphones, and Android’s backers hope to spread it to an even wider array of handsets. Linux is also driving many avant garde connected consumer electronics devices such as the Chumby, Nokia N810, Amazon Kindle, Dash Express, and whatever the fertile minds tinkering with Bug Labs’ modules are envisioning,. Even the remote control that houses the user interface of Logitech’s Squeezebox Duet is a Linux computer…

Read the rest of the story here

Hillary will drop out by June 15

By Lawrence O’Donnell
for HuffingtonPost.com
May 7, 2008
Click here for the original story
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“A senior campaign official and Clinton confidante has told me that there will be a Democratic nominee by June 15. He could not bring himself to say the words “Hillary will drop out by June 15,” but that is clearly what he meant. I kept saying, “So, Hillary will drop out by June 15,” and he kept saying, “We will have a nominee by June 15.” He stressed what a reasonable person Hillary is.

Everything about our conversation implied that he had already had this reality-based discussion with Hillary. He said the Clinton campaign plan is to collect as many votes and delegates as they can right through June 3, then take no more than a week or so to make their case to the superdelegates. Nothing he said indicated that he actually expected the superdelegates to move to Hillary in the week after the final election. The Clinton campaign has not lost its grip on reality. Yes, Clinton spokespersons publicly seem to be lost on gravity-free planet Clinton, but privately they know the end is near.”

Interrogator Shares Saddam’s Confessions, Tells 60 Minutes Former Iraqi Dictator Didn’t Expect U.S. Invasion

(CBS) For a man who drew America into two wars and countless military engagements, we never knew what Saddam Hussein was thinking. But you are going to hear more than has ever been revealed before.

After his capture, Saddam met every day with one man, an American he knew as “Mr. George.” George is FBI agent George Piro, who was the front man for a team of FBI and CIA analysts who were trying to answer some of the great mysteries of recent history. What happened to the weapons of mass destruction? Was Saddam in league with al Qaeda? Why did he choose war with the United States?

As correspondent Scott Pelley reports, Piro is the man who came to know Saddam better than anyone, as they sat face to face in a windowless room.

See the entire video segment here

Tim Russert declares: Obama is the Democratic Party Nominee

And the fat lady sings…

BREAKING from DrudgeReport.com

CONGRESSIONAL SOURCE: Hillary having trouble finding superdelegates who will meet with her... 'No one wants to see her today'... Developing...

http://www.drudgereport.com

Barack Obama’s NC Victory Speech

The BEST part of the speech:

“…Yes, we know what’s coming. We’ve seen it already. The same names and labels they always pin on everyone who doesn’t agree with all their ideas. The same efforts to distract us from the issues that affect our lives by pouncing on every gaffe and association and fake controversy in the hope that the media will play along. The attempts to play on our fears and exploit our differences to turn us against each other for pure political gain – to slice and dice this country into Red States and Blue States; blue-collar and white-collar; white and black, and brown.

This is what they will do – no matter which one of us is the nominee. The question, then, is not what kind of campaign they’ll run, it’s what kind of campaign we will run. It’s what we will do to make this year different. I didn’t get into race thinking that I could avoid this kind of politics, but I am running for President because this is the time to end it.
We will end it this time not because I’m perfect – I think by now this campaign has reminded all of us of that. We will end it not by duplicating the same tactics and the same strategies as the other side, because that will just lead us down the same path of polarization and gridlock.
We will end it by telling the truth – forcefully, repeatedly, confidently – and by trusting that the American people will embrace the need for change.”

The METI Controversy: Is Detection by Alien Life a Threat to the Human Species?

By Luke McKinney
DailyGalaxy.com
May 6, 2008
See the original story here
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Mankind has always been driven by contradictory drives.  The relentless curiosity that pushes us forward and is directly responsible for our progress from caves to  cities.  The fear of change that tells us “hang on, these caves/cities are really nice, we don’t want to risk losing them.”  There isn’t any greater potential threat to the status quo than the discovery of extraterrestrial life, which is why some people would prefer we didn’t try.

There has been some outrage recently over attempts to contact intelligent aliens, where instead of hiding in the corner and listening real hard some astronomers beamed intense directional messages up up and away.  Critics decried these actions as dangerous, though their fears reveal more about us than any eventual ETs.  They assume that they would be similar to humanity, so their first response to finding a more primitive culture would be to exploit the hell out of it.  While such a fate might be pleasingly ironic (for anyone who isn’t human, at least), others contend that any species that can make the journey here has advanced to a point where their goals are rather higher-minded than “Shoot us”.

Dr Alexander Zaitzev, of the Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics at the Russian Academy of Sciences, doesn’t think much of these worries either way.  A proponent of METI (Messaging to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), in a recent paper he shows that the odds of one of the METI messages being detected is a millionth of that due to powerful radar pulses regularly used in astronomical investigation.  Though whether writing a paper saying “This METI thing we’re doing has only a tiny chance of working” is overall a good idea remains to be seen.  An important point is that METI represents an intentional will to make contact, rather than the accidental alien interception of some random radiation from Earth – the difference between saying “Hello!” and just being a suspicious strange noise late at night.

Most of the objections to contacting aliens are weak under close examination.  We can’t suddenly decide to hide after fifty years of pumping electromagnetic radiation into space without rhyme or reason – in fact, we’d better hope that an advanced civilization doesn’t catch an episode of “American Idol” and just vaporize us outright.  Suddenly keeping quiet would be like a drunk boyfriend carefully taking off his shoes after knocking over a bookshelf on his way to the bedroom.

Then there’s the assumption that aliens would have the same kind of technology we do – despite the extremely obvious fact that our technology can’t actually get to other planets.  Any attempt to mask radio emissions will likely look like cavemen closing their eyes to hide from satellite imaging.

The simple fact is that certain people have always opposed progress while other, better people have driven it.  “Experts” decried boiled water as unhealthy compared the vital stuff straight from the river, cursed antibiotics as a temporary placebo, and confidently declared that computers were nothing but expensive toys.  As an intelligent species we must make every effort to contact anyone or thing we can – and if you don’t like it, there are some lovely caves you can move back to.

Russert: Clinton cancels morning show appearances

politico.com —  Tim Russert, a colleague reports, just said that Hillary Clinton canceled her scheduled appearances on the morning shows tomorrow.

See the full story here