The only thing PNGV gave us was the Toyota Prius, and they weren't even allowed into the Partnership.

No, if I were a congressman who still remembered how PNGV turned entirely into pork, I wouldn't even want to give these assholes another $30 million.

I think this was supposed to send a very clear message that Congress isn't very happy with Detroit right now, and thinks they should fix their own problems.

I gotta wonder how much or if AsusTek's star has fallen within Apple over all the problems with this design.

Has Apple used them for earlier designs?

All I want is a charger that can power, AND be powered by USB cable. Is that really such a tall order?

(Yes, obviously I don't mean both at the same time).

I'd love a device where I could take the USB cable and plug it into my desktop to charge it up, then unplug it and reverse the cable to charge up my portable devices while I'm on the go.

There was a little device like this that held 4 AA rechargable batteries (even better!), but at the time it was available only in the UK.

You can give a man food, water, vaccines. You can keep his children from dying slow, horrible deaths. You can do all of this without giving a man any dignity, or any power over his own destiny. It is my belief that this observation is behind much of what Negroponte and his friends are trying to do.


I get a bad vibe off of some of the officials decrying this program. It may be that my political platform and experiences are causing me to read far too much into what's being said. Some of the statements seem to be thinly veiled sentiments that the people should just be grateful that they have been given clean drinking water.

And as others have said, there are the wretchedly poor 3rd world countries, like Haiti, which need far more intervention than a clever electronic gadget. In many of these cases, independent efforts involving bigger commitments by the WHO are needed before we can

There are programs to bring appropriate technologies to the rural poor of the world, people at subsistence level. They apply modern design techniques with ancient materials. One example is the terra cotta refrigerator that was rediscovered recently (some claim that subsaharan nomads have known this design for centuries, if anyone had bothered asking). Another is the cook stove. There are substantial areas of the world that still cook their food using, quite literally, stone-age and bronze-age cooking methods. In many cases, these fires are indoors, with poor ventilation

There are designs for cook stoves that reduce fuel usage by almost half, and eliminate much of the pollution created. The simplest of these designs (the Rocket Stove) constitutes a couple of tin cans and some wood ash. A number of people have spent a great deal of time tuning these designs so that they can be made largely or entirely with indigenous materials.

How do you get designs like these to rural South America, or Bangledesh? Should we stage a new outreach program every time a new appropriate technology is discovered? Wouldn't a reliable information conduit make more sense in the long run?

My god, is that thing ugly. And what's that giant black brick he's trying to hide behind that poor iPod?