David Zeuthen wrote on Fri, 31 Mar 2006 13:40:28 -0500 > On Thu, 2006-03-30 at 21:33 -0500, Jim Gettys wrote: > > Even so, the expense of the cable becomes considerable. > > I have heard stories (urban legends?) that in parts of the former soviet > union, villains would disrupt the existing communications infrastructure > by digging up copper cables only to sell the copper.
Here in Brazil all the phone and power lines are above ground, so no digging is needed. Once in a while there is a power outage around here due to people stealing the wires. Back in the mid-1980s there was a brief fad of stealing man-hole covers to sell the metal and a friend of mine had his car totally ruined as a result of falling into an open hole. Let's just hope nobody spreads a rumor about how you could extract the gold from the electronics inside the Laptop or some other such nonsense. Still on this topic, Nicholas Negroponte mentioned in one of his talks a government program in Brazil where the kids would get shoes to go to school with and some parents would sell the shoes making them walk barefoot. All such programs that I am aware of give money directly to the parents, so the OLPC project will actually be the first large scale experiment in non monetary help. The closest I can think of is programs where workers get "tickets" for food or public transportation to complement their salary, and these quickly become an alternative currency mostly used for things other than their original purposes. -- Jecel -- olpc-software mailing list [email protected] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/olpc-software
