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Bush-friendly extreme right french president Sarkozy wants to disconnect people from the Internet, put people on a national database and not allow them to sign up for another ISP, then fine users up to 3 million euros and put them in jail even. This is so ridiculously funny ridiculous, putting the kids and other young people in jail, fine them, ban them from using the Internet just because they are not accepting to pay intermediaries like Fnac for a service that is absolutely useless to both artists and consumers.

What is funny is that the guy who wrote this law is the CEO of Fnac, which is the biggest retail store chain in France for CDs and DVDs. Such distributor is totally useless in this digital age, where artists should be able to sell their music directly to the consumers with no intermediaries in between taking the biggest part of the transaction.

What will happen is that the french will Boycott participating CD and DVD retailers such as Fnac, boycott the major music and movie studios for wanting to keep control on the cultural industries at all cost. The french people will pirate more if such a law is enacted, cause secured encrypted p2p networks will florish, to keep the music and film majors from sniffing users IP addresses which ISPs are obligated to provide in this law (even the progressive Free Iliad was forced by the Culture minister to comply with this law in exchange of getting the last 3G telecommunications licence). Sniffing users IP addresses is something that the music and movie studios can do with open eMule and BitTorrent p2p networks. But the french will just be able to add a layer of encryption and proxies to the eMule and BitTorrent p2p networks, and thus they will have an unstoppable, untrackable p2p network.

The established music, movie and distribution majors are just interested to keep their control on the cultural industry income for as long as they can. They are probably hoping that they can stay in control of those billions of euros for another few years. The cultural development is loosing out during this unreasonable process and so are artists and the people.

I contributed to Ségolène Royal’s campaign by video-blogging at http://sego.tv and having done what I could so that she had DivX DVD quality video streaming, Miro BitTorrent RSS integration on her official campaign website at http://videos.desirsdavenir.org (my videos are under “Votez Danois!”):

Intel’s agreement with the OLPC Foundation included a “non disparagement” clause, under which Intel and One Laptop promised not to criticize each other, according to Nicholas Negroponte in the latest article in the Wall Street Journal.

Still Intel tactics has violated that repeatedly to kill OLPC efforts in Nigeria, Libya, Pakistan, India, China and Intel is also still trying to pull those tactics in Mexico, Brazil.

This is simply disgracefull of Intel, scandalous. But Negroponte has signed an agreement saying that he is not allowed to criticize Intel, so he is not allowed to talk about these shameless tactics even though Intel is the one violating the agreement. So only independant voices on the Internet can get those messages of truth out about Intels tactics.

In Nigeria, Intel came and donated 3000 laptops to counter OLPC efforts, then sells 17 thousand Classmates to Nigeria at a loss. Then Microsoft corrupted Nigerian officials with 400 thousand dollars to install Windows XP on those instead of Mandriva Linux.

Anyways, the next step will be that Intel is investing hundreds of millions to develop the Diamondville x86 processor that is the Intel version of a fanless, low cost, low power processor, and alternative to the AMD Geode.

So the next step is there will have to be an Intel powered XO laptop ready for mass production. Otherwise it simply seems Intel will not allow OLPC to start the mass production. So possibly some deal will be done between OLPC, Intel and AMD, so that 50% be built with AMD processors and 50% with Intel processors. Hopefully Intel executives will let it mass produce and mass distribute with that sort of agreement.

Thankfully CMO, Quanta, AMD and all other involved have accepted to delay the up ramping of mass production, they are complying to Intel’s shameless behavior of delaying the OLPC project, since only 300 thousand AMD powered OLPC XO laptops are being produced in the first few months in Quanta’s factories. But at any time in the beginning of next year, mass production could reach a volume of over a million laptops per month.

The question is will Intel allow OLPC to start ramping up mass production to its maximum production capacity of exclusively the AMD powered version even though the Intel Diamondville integration might not be completely ready before the middle to second half of next year? Will Intel agree to stop selling its inferior and more expensive ULV powered Classmate PC? Will Intel tell Asus to stop marketing the current ULV powered version of the Asus Eee as an OLPC competitor?

With an average revenue of $2 million per day for the Give 1 Get 1 program, that is 100 thousand XO-1 laptops sold in 10 days. Half of these are going to developing nations.

The OLPC Foundation is extending the Give 1 Get 1 program until the 31st of December.

Source is: http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20071122005019&newsLang=en

Awesome video, done with his cell phone (I guess the Nokia N95) while walking around his home in the Silicon Valley:

Posted at Scobleizer.com

I hope Amazon will add these features in a future firmware update or/and in the European HSDPA+WiFi version which is hopefully planned to be released soon:

- There should be an open RSS aggregator, one that updates feeds when the user is active or that can automatically pull feeds every once in a while and certain feeds can be set to make the device beep or display an alert when there is a new item.

- One should be able to drag and drop PDF, DOC, TXT, HTML or any other such formats onto it using the USB cable, or download from other services on the Internet and it should work directly. It could offer the Amazon Kindle conversion for a fee like it does through the Kindle email, but it should be able to upload the text file from the device, store it in the cloud and pull it back on demand.

- Google Blog Search, Google News (Amazon could auto-reformat web news pages to display with ebook optimized adds in cooperation with the websites that are linked to from Google News, thus there should be an ebook optimized Google News interface), Google Reader type of RSS aggregator, Gmail and other Google apps should work on this.

- The full web browser and Wikipedia could be part of such a full Internet data plan, one where Amazon could charge money per MB or per GB packages that one wishes to use to download data over the wireless connection that isn’t content that Amazon can earn money on directly. So for example I wouldn’t mind paying 1 or a few dollars per GB over this full Internet access data plan. Thus alternative online book stores, audible.com, Google Booksearch should be accessible this way over the wireless connection and Amazon can charge reasonably priced data fees for that.

- Audiobook to ebook synchronization service, line could be highlighted on demand or maybe even the sentence or the word could be highlighted while the audiobook is playing. And a function to continue reading the book in audio mode and then resuming to reading the text and turning off the audio. Adding the audiobook version to an ebook shouldn’t be very expensive, I’d think around $2 should be a reasonable price to get the additional audiobook downloaded and synched up.

- One should be somehow able to get ones personal book collection digitized. Although there are rights restrictions to this currently, and one cannot provide bills for all ones book collection. Possibly there should be a service where one would send in the used books to Amazon, who then adds the titles to ones Kindle account manually and Amazon can then recycle those used paperback books on their website. That is until regulation changes in this area so that one will in the future have unlimited access to old books for a flat culture licence fee.

- An external USB keyboard is better to type long texts on this then the thumb keyboard. So unless the hardware does not make it possible, I think there should be somekind of way to put the device on the table with a kickstand or using a kickstand with the leathercase, and then unfold a full sized keyboard to enter text rapidly.

Otherwise the Amazon Kindle is awesome and it will kick-start the electronic reading revolution in my view.

I posted this at the Amazon Customer Discussions about the Kindle and at the MobileRead.com forum.

Built-in EVDO sounds cool. As long as the EVDO access is very reasonably priced, like somekind of very affordable per MB cost with no monthly payment or something like that.

I wish the wireless was HSDPA and compatible with wireless data around the world, even built-in WiFi would have been nice.

As it loads New York Times and Washington Post every morning, it should also be able to load ones Google Reader feeds in the morning.

Touch-screen and smart keyboard will be awesome. There should be somekind of browser in there.

The Electronic Books should be sold for very reasonable prices, since so many intermediaries including the printing of the paper back version are skipped. There should also be somekind of way to let people get the taste of a book for free before buying, something like a few chapters should be free, and payment is confirmed at that point.

Getting access to Google apps on e-paper will be awesome. Such things as search, blog search, Google maps, Gmail, Google News, all that should be working over the EVDO, using Google Gears to speed up the process and provide offline functionality to save battery power.

Taking notes with a foldable USB keyboard, and thus post to blogs, emails, reviews and more directly using the device, without the need to have a computer.

I think it’s great that Microsoft is investing millions of dollars in making a thin version of Windows XP for the XO-1 laptop. That is just really great of Microsoft.

What is really sad, is that Nigeria and Libya are getting relatively low volumes of bloated Classmate laptops. They chose to get a few tens of thousands of bloated Classmate laptops instead of going for the much more sustainable and future proof XO design.

All in terms of power consumption, usabillity, wireless, screen readabillity, software optimization for unbloatedness (both Linux Sugar and whatever “XP Lite” that Microsoft can do).

Classmate and Eee on the other hand are nothing else then totally regular laptops with the regular unoptimized structure of a bloatware-laptop with a totally conventionnal DVD player 7″ LCD and Flash memory instead of the HDD. On top of that there is no way Classmate and Eee are going to be sold at $200 in quantities of millions. Intel is working on a AMD Geode alternative, and that is GREAT and I hope Intel and AMD push the limits of low power and cheap price for a X86 processor, but Intel should really not insist with the ULV based Classmate and Eee.

So what for Intel if they are not part of XO-1, Intel can be part of XO-2 and can “catch up” within the next few months with Menlow and Diamondville.

But the basic thing is will Intel and others in the PC industry such as Asus and Dell stop thinking they should keep PCs and Laptops expensive and bloated forever. The cheap laptop revolution cannot be stopped now, this society is too open for that to happen now. So Intel should stop delaying OLPC, cause every day that goes by, millions of kids are missing out on being part of the information society and learning about everything.

Actually I do think Microsoft will open-source Windows XP at some point within the next couple of years at one point or another and give licences for it away for free, and that will be cool. At least there will be no other way for Microsoft to compete with Linux for cheap laptops.

Microsoft will keep Vista closed and expensive, but XP should become open and free.

That would bring so much good PR to Microsoft and they can still invest in Vista for business and for the expensive laptops and PCs, Microsoft has to get onto other businesses such as online applications, online advertising, video games, portable and wearable computers.

I was there during the french presidential campaign in France, when I was filming the 462 videos for http://sego.tv with a selection at http://videos.desirsdavenir.org. I was invited a few times during the campaign when I was in Paris to the campaign headquarters as I was working with the webmaster team.

This video was filmed just a few minutes after she did her concession speech, a few minutes after the official final election results appeared on the french TV channels at 8PM on the 6th of May 2007.

I still think the french socialists were robbed the vote by a right wing which controls all media in France thus most of the information channels during a political campaign. France has illegal oil, gas, nuclear and other special interests around the world as well as there are unethical monopolies inside and outside of France, which forced Nicolas Sarkozy to the presidency and which made sure not to loose control over french politics.

I believe in a democratic revolution in Europe which could change the fundaments of the society and change the way every country is governed. The revolution will happen on the Internet.

Now I am covering the parliamentary election campaign of the Radical Left party in Denmark at http://radikale.tv.

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