There are some games which are just plain fun like Solitaire, Checkers, and Asteroids. There are others which are deeply disturbing or earnestly frightening like most of Rock Star’s games, most of IDs games, or the Half-Life series. There are few, however, which can bridge the gap, but tiny Mac games developer Freeverse, likely best known for Jared and Burning Monkey Solitaire, has done it.

Witness the advent of SimStapler Arena, the long awaited update to the original, non-networkable SimStapler. Marvel at its extraordinary depth and grace as you staple wantonly and without regard to human safety. SimStapler Arena brings more than personal satisfaction to the table, as it now incorporates an online component which allows you to bring the stapling beatdown to those of lesser quality and lacking in multi-page finishing capabilities. Continue reading »

written by Tyler Regas \\ tags: games, news, social

Oh, its no surprise. John C. Dvorak is ranting and raving again, this time about how useless and pointless Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child intiative is. It is, in fact cruel, according to him. How crass and naive we must be to think that giving a laptop to a starving child will miraculously save his or her poor life. You know, John. You’re right. A laptop won’t save a child’s life. It won’t feed them. If they are starving when they get the laptop, they will still die if they don’t get any food.

By the same token, a truckload of rice won’t educate them, either. It won’t teach them how to farm or read or give them weather information. In fact, deliveries of rice merely teaches them about loss and dependence. They don’t get fed all the time because there’s not enough to go around and they just wait for the food to come because they don’t have to do anything to get it. Deliveries of such foodstuffs to the hundreds of thousands of poor villages around the world teach the truly starving how to use crutches.

What this teaches us, the ones who can feed ourselves when we want to (and dive headlong into morbid obesity), is that there are far more than one simple thing we need to do to fix the world’s hunger problem. Providing massive shipments of rice to the hungry is certainly one important thing we can do, and we do it. Your contributions, John, have added to that. Now, however, we have a new direction we can go in to further improve the lives of these people. Education is one of the most complicated problems to solve and the OLPC directly addresses that one issue.

Tell me, John. If its so hard to feed these people how easy could it possibly be to educate them. Is it as easy to build a school, provide teachers, print and deliver text books (in various different languages), provide daily lunches, define local, regional, and state laws regarding village and school safety (think raiders and thieving warlords), eliminate war and conflict, and get ultra-rich people to give away all of their money as it is to drop off a bag of rice?

The real slap in the face of these destitute peoples is the bag of rice, John. Who decides how much rice goes where? Will there be enough to go around? Who gets fed? Who gets left to die of starvation? Who gets to say which poor villages even see deliveries or even which countries poor benefits from such programs? Someone once said that to give a man a fish feeds him for a day, but to teach him to fish is to feed him for a lifetime. The OLPC XO-1 is that teacher where, otherwise, there would be none.

written by Tyler Regas \\ tags: media, news, social

Nicholas’ Negroponte’s pet project, the One Laptop Per Child model XO-1, has been given the green light, and Peru is apparently jumping on board right away with a 260,000 system order. Good for them (if they can clean up the rest of their human rights violations). Right now, however, you can make a difference in the life of at least one child, if not more. Head here and donate US$399 to OLPC and they will send one laptop to a child who needs one and one to you. The more you donate, the more laptops. I’m fully behind this one, so get going. Hurry, though. It ends December 31st.
You may question why a child living in a village which has no power or running water might need a laptop. You can sure bet they aren’t going to be checking in on their stock portfolio (hell, I don’t do that!) but they will be learning. In studies performed by MIT Media Lab they determined that children 6-12 who had never seen a computer before were able to start effectively using the XO-1 within three minutes! Not only that, but they move on to teach other kids. They then take the laptop home and teach their family.

This simple, clear, uncluttered, and audacious approach to improving the level of education in the world is a powerful concept, indeed. Sure, it won’t make Harvard graduates out of Nigerian children overnight, but it makes the US$2,000 status symbol laptop look more like a common phone and levels the playing field in a number of ways. Check out this great review over at the Fox News site. Make sure to read it all.

written by Tyler Regas \\ tags: awareness, education, green, mobile, social