Well some may be laughing, but Nicholas Negroponte and the MIT Media Lab people really do seem to be moving this project forward. More power to their elbow!
Taiwan’s Quanta, the world’s largest maker of notebook computers, will manufacture an ultra-low-cost laptop developed by Nicholas Negroponte, the chairman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab.
Negroponte, [...]

Sun Microsystems really do seem to have an important point here. If there aren’t some common underlying standards then reading todays documents fifty years from now could become just like trying to read Linear B today:
Speaking to a group of reporters, Sun’s top open-source executive said that a format like OpenDocument (ODF) is needed [...]

Well, pretty damn reliable apparently. Or at least that is the view expressed by the scientific journal Nature who have just carried out the first peer based comparative review of Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica in terms of their science coverage. Clearly cases like the Seigenthaler one are the exception rather than the rule, and Britannica [...]

The Comics Reporter reports:
A court of appeals in Turkey has thrown out a fine against a cartoonist who depicted Prime Minister Reycip Erdogan as a horse. Sefer Selvi’s cartoon appeared in April 2004 and led to an approximately $7500 fine — although I admit I’m guessing on that latter fact, what with their being multiple [...]

Will there or won’t there be an eleventh hour agreement on the new EU budget. Tony Blair is clearly burning the midnight oil, but the foreign ministers did not seem to be unduly impressed:
EU foreign ministers’ talks on the 2007-2013 budget ended after less than a minute on Monday (12 December), with the UK set [...]

The latest inflation eport from the Federal Statistical Office in Germany says this:
The harmonised consumer price index for Germany, which is calculated for European purposes, rose by 2.3% in November 2005 compared with November 2004. Compared with the previous month, the index was down 0.5%. The estimate of 25 November 2005 was thus slightly corrected [...]

The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town
In Istanbul this Friday—in Şişli, the district where I have spent my whole life, in the courthouse directly opposite the three-story house where my grandmother lived alone for forty years—I will stand before a judge. My crime is to have “publicly denigrated Turkish identity.” The prosecutor will ask [...]

Yesterday the news from Italy was the sudden drop in industrial output, today it is the fact that this makes Berlusconi’s re-election much more uphill work. In particular his coalition just lost a vote in Messina, Sicily, that they normally should have won.
This trend in indutrial output is important for what it implies about [...]

At the present time some 66 countries have fertility rates which are below the level necessary for population replacement (TFR 2.1). Within the next decade the number of counries in this group is set to grow to the point where a majority of the world’s population will be living in regions where the existing [...]

Inflation in the eurozone is not about to spiral out of control. I have been arguing this for months now. The latest piece of evidence: French consumer prices fell 0.3 percent in November as compared with the previous month:
French consumer prices fell 0.3 percent in November on the previous month, national statistics office INSEE reported [...]