Some pushback from Taran Ramparsad. Also this from Tom Hoffman. (And privately from some people.)

For what it’s worth, I’ve loved the ambitions of the OLPC program from the beginning, even if I thought they were crazy to start in 5th gear by rolling a zillion laptops out to 3rd world countries, too many of which are run by dictatorships that could be bought by actual vendors.

Still. Ordinary laptops have been stale for a long time.

Even if they crater, they’ve blazed a worthy trail along the way.

That’s one line from Rebuilding the software industry, one word at a time, written more than seven years ago for Kuro5hin, which is still, commendably, around. Just ran across it again now. Hadn’t read it in years. Holds up pretty well.

Here’s the beginning. Good story.

I’m reminded of this by On the pot-holed highway to hell, by John Gapper in the Financial Times. It begins,

If anyone doubts the problems of US infrastructure, I suggest he or she take a flight to John F. Kennedy airport (braving the landing delay), ride a taxi on the pot-holed and congested Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and try to make a mobile phone call en route.

That should settle it, particularly for those who have experienced smooth flights, train rides and road travel, and speedy communications networks in, say, Beijing, Paris or Abu Dhabi recently. The gulf in public and private infrastructure is, to put it mildly, alarming for US competitiveness...

There are lots of ways in which infrastructure inadequacy matters to the US but I would focus on two.

First, it imposes a drag on economic growth. The private infrastructure is poor enough - broadband speeds lag behind other countries and mobile coverage is spotty. But much of the public infrastructure is unfit, a fact that was becoming clear even before Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans and a Minneapolis bridge collapsed during rush hour last year.

Second, it presents an awful image of the US to investors and other visitors. The state of transport and communications infrastructure is a symbol of a nation’s economic development and the US is starting to look like a third world country. In fact, scratch that. Many developing countries look and feel better.

Of course, they are in a different phase of development. The US invested 10 per cent of its federal non-military budget in infrastructure in the 1950s and 1960s as it built the interstate highway system - at the time, the envy of the world. While US investment has fallen to less than 1 per cent of gross domestic product, China has been matching its double-digit postwar record.

Will this be an issue in the upcoming election? Barack Obama lists 21 issues in a pull-down menu. One of those is “additional issues“. There are six of those. Last on the list is “transportation“. Its entire text says “As our society becomes more mobile and interconnected, the need for 21st-century transportation networks has never been greater. However, too many of our nation’s railways, highways, bridges, airports, and neighborhood streets are slowly decaying due to lack of investment and strategic long-term planning. Barack Obama believes that America’s long-term competitiveness depends on the stability of our critical infrastructure. As president, Obama will make strengthening our transportation systems, including our roads and bridges, a top priority.” But there is a .pdf of the full plan. Argue with it if you like, but at least he has one.

John McCain lists 13 issues in his pull-down Issues menu. None of them cover this stuff, near as I can tell.

It’s great to see what I saw coming in 2003 finally start to take off.

Cluetrain, for me at least, was about that.

So now user freedom is at issue again, this time in the context of “social networking”, which in the current popular sense happens almost entirely inside company walled gardens. Some companies are larger than others, and some gardens have openings in their hedges for “federation” of user data, at the latter’s grace. But your data is still theirs, pretty much. That’s how it plays in the media, and probably in the minds of most of the companies involved as well.

So I just wrote about where I think this is going, in Who controls your data, over at Linux Journal. See what ya think.

Now I have five emails from friends, so far, plus one each from my wife and my sister, each with copies of spams from Reunion.com. The reunion.com emailings go like this:

I left out the links.

Oh, I also got one like the above, from myself. Another other notified me that “You’ve just been added to Doc Searls’s Reunion.com Address Book.”

What address book? And how exactly did they get that list of contacts?

Fortunately all those friends and relatives who wrote back were smarter than I was and saw the email from reunion.com as the scam it is. Others? I dunno. Live and re-learn, I guess.

Here’s the Google lookup of Reunion.com and spam. Plenty there.

I am among the least litigious people on Earth. But I can’t help but wonder … Could I (or we) sue these bastards for false representation? Invasion of privacy?