A fun thought-experiment

On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 3:18 PM, Brian Lanning <brianlanning at gmail.com> wrote: It's true, they are, and I do donate. 8 screens to ComputerAid last month, and 4 whole PCs to a small charity in Vauxhall in South London, all destined for sub-Saharan Africa. But there's a difference between charity & a product to be sold. Also, there's a limit to what someone who lives in a shanty-town can afford and use. These people may have no mains electricity, no furniture etc. A keyboard that runs off a couple of Watts, that can be plugged into a car battery and use the communal TV, is a bit different from a multi-hundred-Watt business PC with a system unit, screen, keyboard, mouse, etc. - and which needs a fair bit of expertise to use, as opposed to a dead-simple solid-state device with no disk drives. There already are charities trying to persuade companies to donate old PCs to equip schools. What we geeks need to do is persuade people that the Right Thing To Do is to wipe the hard disk with DBAN or something like that, not remove it and destroy it. I know a number of large organizations that will NOT donate old kit - it's all destroyed. We need to change that. But also, even the poor have pride. Many people hate taking charity "gifts". They'd rather /buy/ something with their own money to better their kids' prospects. That's basic human nature & not to be ignored. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? LiveJournal/Twitter: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508