By Will Cade

When I think of competition, I usually imagine blood thirsty corporate lions pouncing on anyone they can to get a leg up. If anyone benefits from this merciless striving, it’s the individual at the top. Sometimes, though, more than co-workers stabbed in the back trail in the wake. A trail of innovation can also follow behind, waiting for the right opportunity to be put to good use.

Innovation and competition are probably the most intense in the computing world. Advancing exponentially, computers double in speed and nearly half in price every 2 years. Most people from our generation have experienced this trend. Say you receive a laptop for graduation and head off to university feeling well prepared and at least a little bit proud of your new, gleaming piece of hardware. By your third semester, a whole new generation of students have made their way onto campus, with a whole new generation of laptops. If you’re a techno-junkie like me, you might ask them what their “specs” are (like processing speed, hard drive size, RAM, etc.) and how much they paid. Realizing these newbies have cheaper, smaller, and better laptops, you might have the philanthropic desire to usher them into university life - with a good hazing.

Although this trend may bruise your ego on the university campus, it’s also helping usher the third world into the digital age. Up to this point, the information super highway has been reserved to industrialized powers. But now, thanks to cheaper, smaller, and better laptops, technology companies are marketing $100 laptops to developing countries. Well, the cost was $100, but after a slight revamp, the more traditional laptop has become a flat-panel, touch screen laptop doubling as an e-book, which costs closer to $200.[1]

Don’t crucify the capitalists just yet; even when they’re bettering humanity, they’re still human, and damn good businessmen. These revamps are intended to help school children, for they can function as laptops and e-books, saving schools money on books. Provided technology continues advancing like it has, these laptops should become cheaper in the next year or so. The designers of the laptop are also offering tax-deductible contribution programs (1 laptop to 1 child for $200) if you’re interested in contributing yourself.[2]

Or, if you’re a broke university student and you can’t even afford to buy yourself a new laptop, technology is offering you another way to do some good in the world. The website www.thehungersite.com donates food for every click and has links to sister sites for breast cancer, child health, literacy, the rainforest, and animal rescue. I have it as my homepage on my own laptop, so even if I spend the whole day gluttonously downloading pirated music, I at least start the day by doing some good.

[2] http://laptopfoundation.org/en/participate/

by Will Cade

Every news agency around the world is covering the disaster relief efforts for the cylone ravished country of Burma (also known as Myanmar). 22,000 Burmese are dead, and allegedly some 1.5 million more are facing starvation and disease in the days to come. The Burmese Government, led by its Military Council, is currently accepting some aid packages from beyond its beyorders but is refusing aid workers and media crews. The media is covering every detail of these events as they unfold, yet only a few articles have even mentioned probably the most pertinent question: why would a government refuse help?

In my experience, people only refuse help if they are proud, they can actually handle it themselves, or they have something to hide. Being that corpses are still rotting in the streets days after the cyclone has passed, the Burmese Governemnt obviously can’t handle this on its own. On the same note, I don’t see how any government (even a military Dictatorship) could feel proud when its people are starving and dying in the street. So what possible explanations does that leave us, or, perhaps more accurately, what is the Burmese government trying to hide?

The Burmese Military Leaders are notoriously suspicious of westerners, even during times of stability - if that word can even apply to a country which brutally represseses any political opposition. When non-violent protests began in multiple cities in 2007, the government deployed riot police who at times fired live rounds into the crowds. The government later raided Buddhist monasteries to detain political dissidents. The exact accounts of these events are still disputed, in part because the government refused western journalists access and allegedly blocked all access to the internet.

If this repressive trend continues, we may never learn why the Burmese Government is refusing aid. The sad fact is that the Burmese government cannot seem to keep all information within its borders: the rising death toll is updated almost by the hour.