Creating precarious working places for otherwise desperate people helps a lot but on the other hand can't lift an economy out of poverty.
As long as most countries in the so called "third world" get exploited by the West which via the IMF and World Bank does not even allow them to built an infrastructure ("barriers to free trade" like hospitals, schools, environmental protection, labor rights) they won't make it.
The West should pay reparations for colonialism and slavery to the countries affected by them. This would ease the situation a little.
"So like micro-credit, it seems that access to electricity is more about making life in rural communities more convenient than it is about climbing out of poverty."
Making life convenient is climbing out of poverty. In the West only the homeless don't own TV or can't at least afford them. You can't expect people who have nothing to invest the first money they get.
On the other hand mobile phones have proven very useful in the developing world. They get used for everything: Banking, people rent their mobiles to other people (like a phone booth so to say), even organizing fishing (fishers exchange news where the fish actually is).
I coded my first drag & drop in 1999 using DHTML. It worked on both major browsers, NS4 and IE5. It's sad to see that 10 years later it still is a problem to use drag & drop in web development.
I just hope that when PPK unwinds a bit that he presents the issues he experienced to appropriate W3C feedback channel... written in a more factual style. We really need them to hear this.
Considering how popular PPK's site is and that the first person to reply is Hixie, the author of the HTML5 spec, I think they'll already know his feelings by now ;)
I wonder why people still have to explain that Twitter has value. After all this company is worth at least 1 billion $. Unless we're all have been abducted by aliens and brainwashed to use it there must be some value otherwise the billion wouldn't be there to back it up.
People who want to convince us that Twitter has no value wanted to tell us the same thing about Facebook a year ago. Now they earn money already, one year earlier than planned.
To me this sounds like envy. Everybody believing that s/he has the best startup idea out there but instead something "value-less" like Twitter is worth a billion. Get over it and try to copy the Twitter business model instead and make some money.
There were people who didn't believe that airplanes would ever fly. They're too heavy! The same kind of mentality abounds when it comes to Twitter critics.
If you are tired of it, ignore it. IMHO. Don't tell others what to do. Using your logic we've had to tell people to shut up about Apple, Google and Microsoft as well.
Why not? Everybody does it, including you in the above sentence :)
> Using your logic we've had to tell people to shut up about Apple, Google and Microsoft as well
No, that's not the logic of my post. And yes, I would prefer if fewer articles were about established businesses or about business that haven't found a business model and there's none in sight ... and more about new ways of thinking, new algorithms, new technological breakthroughs and new business models (that are actually working).
Maybe Twitter is alluring because it is a simple, yet very popular service. But you're not going to implement the next Twitter and all the low-hanging fruits have already been taken.
Because it's rude, condescending and self righteous.
"Everybody does it, including you in the above sentence :)"
In German we say "how you shout into the woods so it echoes."
I won't argue with all the pessimism you uttered later but it's astounding how some people manage to deny even to most gigantic successes) A billion? Boooh!
In this case, I suspect that downvoting means that people think you're being snarky about something that is blatantly awesome. Dunno though, as I wasn't one of them.
I guess these are nations that have something to prove in this area, especially China and India. Putting a man on Mars will certainly confirm you to the general world population as a "real" new dominant power.
From a UN Report: "More than 700 million Indians, or roughly two-thirds of the population, do not have adequate sanitation. Largely for lack of clean water, 2.1 million children under the age of 5 die each year"
My point is: shouldn't a country like India put their research and money toward solving THESE problems instead of putting a man on Mars?
I don't understand your comment. You're saying that certain research should take priority over solving internal problems, but space exploration shouldn't...? Why?
Humans in space efforts have nothing to do with research. They are now purely national prestige efforts. And I am extremely pro-space, I just don't think current efforts are doing ANYTHING AT ALL about getting us there permanently.
Also, if you can generate rocket fuel with internal labour (not imported), you can outdo the Americans in rocket fuel cost by a maybe 10x factor (I mean India here, or any economy like Thailand, with a different 'gearing' from the US dollar).
I'm confused -- is labour cost a big part of rocket fuel costs?
Actually I'd like to know much more about rocket economics. How much of the cost is in fuel vs engines vs support staff etc? If we started cranking out Delta rockets at mass production rates could we get the price down to, say, a million bucks a pop?
As long as most countries in the so called "third world" get exploited by the West which via the IMF and World Bank does not even allow them to built an infrastructure ("barriers to free trade" like hospitals, schools, environmental protection, labor rights) they won't make it.
The West should pay reparations for colonialism and slavery to the countries affected by them. This would ease the situation a little.