Seems that Dell laptops have nothing better to do than explode.
Well, my Dell desktop was running quite hot for over a year. Many people found that their Dimension 4700 pcs were pushing the air in, instead of sucking it out of the case, lack of an official word from Dell, just spurred the discussions whether it is an error or a feature. Finally last month I found a quasi-official word on a Dell forum, that indeed, there was a batch of pcs, with reversed fans, but no, they didn’t have any cases of hardware fault due to that.

So I popped out the fan, changed the direction and put it back in. It took less than 10 minutes. A Dell technician wouldn’t have spent much more, were they to make a recall. After that, the disk temperature dropped by over 10C, but pc has become noisier. Before, my disk was working at 55-56C - close to the max. operating 60C, yet still in range. Nothing exploded, nothing has melted nor burnt. And who could prove such long-term consequences, like a possibly reduced lifetime of a disk running at 56C as compared with one running at 43C? Obviously, it is better to play dumb, and wait, hoping that nothing happens. That’s called trust…

The Polish lustration (how cool, this arbitrary use of Latin), aims to find the secret informants from communist times, to weed them out from any kind of civil services.

Now, even if I were to have tried hard, and have spied everyone around, by definition I couldn’t have been an informant - I was born in 1973, and the bill states that only people born before 1972 are suspect. That’s at least what I thought before. Well, today I came to realize that the cutoff date it not the 1st of January 1972. I checked the original act - it is the 10th of May. What a relief! Had my wife been born a couple of days earlier, I would have had to become vigilant ever after! No, but wait, there’s an amendment in the making, which would, among others, change the cutoff date to 1st of August. What will I do, if the amended act becomes a law? These 82 days do make a huge difference for me. Without the temporal limit, it could be that my now-not-suspect wife just might have been denouncing the dissidents, in exchange for lollipops and sweets. She might have been a naughty communist spy of a child, one can never rule out such a possibility… How cool, this arbitrary use of calendar.

Yesterday, I have seen this on Teleread, then it got a lot of steam on Scoble. Well, the original title is over-dramatized, there’s no two words about it. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, so I will refrain from the “I’m oh so good willing” lines trying to prove a mobile phone is not a viable alternative to the $100 laptop.

So we have a Congolese woman trying to sell baskets:

1. Did anyone check the actual coverage data?
   If not, please do so, just for fun. Choose some African Country and see what’s the result. Since I want to be in line with the original post, let’s take the coverage in the Democratic Republic of Congo
   Quite a couple of multi-thousand-dollar BTSes seem to be needed here…
2. Did anyone check the economic data?
   Let’s take the GDP per capita from our Dem. Republic of Congo:
   $774, not bad compared with $41,399 in the USA. How much would a phone call have to cost, so that the woman wanting to sell baskets a couple of cents each, could get even? And of course, so that the mobile operator could get even? Not to mention the price of data transfers. Give the 100 villagers a $40 phone, and build a BTS for them? For that cash alone, that’s a $100 laptop for everyone
3. Did anyone check the political situation?
   In seems that in Democratic Republic of Congo, that’s no picnic either. Would the government in an unstable country be willing to give something as disruptive as access to podcasts and free media?
4. Who says there is any free market, which the mobile phones could drive? How does a basket - phone billing barter work?
   Oh well, that’s just biased speculations of someone who remembers supermarkets with only vinegar on otherwise empty shelves in the communist Poland