Something for the weekend

Steve Lamacq's Radio 6 Show lists a number of helpful music discussion starters: [edited]

1: Can a cover version can ever be better than the original?

2: Is a mouth organ ever really necessary?

3: The Smiths are miserable.

4: Every song with whistling is brilliant.

5: Best Electric Light Orchestra song?

6: Miles Davis, creative genius, or competent bore?

7: The Beatles or the Stones?

8: New Order, fantastic pop, or just plain useless?
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Affordable solar energy moves closer

Nanosolar reports: [edited]

At Nanosolar, we have taken the highest-performance and most durable photovoltaic thin-film semiconductor, called CIGS (for "Copper Indium Gallium Diselenide"), and innovated on all seven critical areas necessary to reach a breakthrough cost reduction in solar cells, panels, and systems.

As opposed to using slow and expensive high-vacuum based thin-film deposition processes, we developed a proprietary ink to allow us to use much simpler and higher-yield printing for depositing the solar cell's semiconductor.

We use a highly conductive yet low-cost foil as a substrate, which allows us to avoid the need to separately deposit an expensive bottom electrode layer (as required for a non-conductive substrate such as glass).

Thanks to Sora for the link.
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Nintendo DS Lite sales record

Reg Hardware reports: [edited]

The Nintendo DS Lite has taken the record for the greatest number of games console units sold in the UK within a single week.

191,000 DS Lites were sold during the seven days up to 24 November.

The console took the crown from Sony’s PSP, which until now had held the record with 188,000 units during its launch week in September 2005.
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Eco Media Player

treehugger.com reports: [edited]

The iconic iPod music player has for many years been challenged by new so-called iPod Killer products entering the market. The Eco Media Player is unlikely to be one of those. But it does add a new dimension to the genre.

The media player bit comes into play as the unit is a video player, music player, fm radio, LED torch, photo viewer, hi-fi recorder, memo recorder, data storage device and a mobile phone charger. The eco prefix is applied because it does all of this without need of replacement batteries. Power comes simply from winding a fold-out handle on the rear of the unit (or, if you want, charging it via USB cable to your computer). 40 minutes of audio play requires one minute of self powering.

An onboard lithium ion battery has a maximum playtime of 20 hours. Audio will play back in mp3, wma, asf, wav, ogg formats (no mention of aac, the iPod default). The 1.8" colour screen shows videos in asv (and wmv, avi, mpeg, after conversion) and photos as jpeg, bmp, gif images. With 2GB of built-in memory the media reader supports SD cards to increase this. Microsoft Windows seems to be the supported operated system when connected to computers with no indication of compatibility with Macs. Sells for £155 in the UK, and $425 in Australia.

If you’re wondering who Trevor Baylis is, he was the British inventor that created the original wind-up radio, as a way of getting information on HIV/AIDS to remote African villagers. The success of that project spawned the brand Freeplay, who have dominated the self powered device market for the past decade.

Trevor looks like he is re-entering that market with this product. Inventors John and Tony Davies approached his ideas incubator company and Trevor so liked what he saw he lent his name to not only the Eco Media Player, but an accompanying line of self-powered eco-products under the moniker of New Generation. There are lanterns, head torches, radios, bicycle lights, etc. Tango in the UK carry the full range.
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World's first jukebox

Wired reports: [edited]

The first jukebox was constructed by the Pacific Phonograph Company in 1889. Four stethoscope-like tubes were attached to an Edison Class M electric phonograph fitted inside an oak cabinet.

The tubes operated individually, each being activated by the insertion of a coin, meaning that four different listeners could be plugged in to the same song simultaneously.

Towels were supplied to patrons so they could wipe off the end of the tube after each listening.

The success of the jukebox eventually spelled the end of the player piano, then the most common way of pounding out popular music to a line of thirsty barflies.

The machine was originally called the “nickel-in-the-slot player” by Louis Glass, the entrepreneur who installed it at the Palais Royale. (A nickel then had the buying power of $1.08 today.)

It came to be known as the jukebox, although the origin of the word remains a bit vague. It may derive from “juke house,” a slang reference to a 'bawdy house', where music was not unknown.
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Buffalo release 320GB pocket hard drive

Reg Hardware reports: [edited]

Dubbed the MiniStation TurboUSB [what, no 'super', no 'nano'?, Ed.], it is protected by a tough outer case. The 5400rpm hard drive is powered through a USB 2.0 connection, with the cable wrapping around the device’s outer rim.

The 320GB drive will be available from next month for £155.
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The West Wing

On Sunday evening, I watched the 154th episode of The West Wing, the finale to the best television series I have ever watched.

Aaron Sorkin, its creator and primary writer for the first four seasons, creates scripts that are intelligent, inventive, challenging and entertaining. The dialogue is sharp, informed and involving, moving you through issues that impact millions of people as it chronicles fictional, but believable days in the life of the White House administration.

The actors are perfectly cast, and they are obviously enjoying living out their characters. And the interaction between them is so dynamic that I often found myself replaying sequences of dialogue in a similar way to which I might re-read a particularly complex, or enjoyable, section of a novel.

Martin Sheen plays the charismatic polymathic Democrat, President Josiah Bartlet (think of a hybrid of John Kennedy and Bill Clinton). Stockard Channing (remember Betty Rizzo in Grease?) plays his equally brilliant, sparky and headstrong doctor wife.

Equality between males and females is assumed. Sexuality is acknowledged but not exploited. Individual's strengths are recognised and rewarded, and weaknesses acknowledged but kept in perspective and rarely despised.

In a single episode you can find yourself laughing out loud, marvelling at the complexity of the American political system, wrestling with a massive military dilemma before bursting into floods of tears at a random act of kindness.

As Sorkin moves away from the writing, the mood of the series does change, with a harder and more negative edge becoming evident. But this never degenerates into 'soap-opera', there is always plenty of respect for honourable behaviour and examples of careful handling of 'real-world' dichotomies and decisions.

If you're thinking of a 'watching project' for next year, why not treat yourself to Series 1 on DVD (available from amazon.co.uk for under £18.00 including delivery). Or if you're feeling rich, the complete DVD box set for £121. That's 154 episodes (112 hours of viewing), on over 44 discs. That's less than a £1 per episode. And you get a bucketful of other stuff thrown in, if you're interested in 'extras'.

If you rationed yourself to 3 episodes a week beginning 1 January that would keep you going through 2008 - although my guess is that you'll have watched the last episode before June is out!
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Gentium redux

I've featured Gentium in a previous blog.

It is now available, in beta form, as two families, Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic from the Summer Institute of Linguistics web site.

Each family features regular, italic, bold and bold italic. Gentium Book Basic is a little heavier in feel than its sister typeface.
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Nokia N810

MobileBurn.com reports: [edited]

The Nokia N810 has a large colour display, touchpad screen, slide-out keyboard, 400 MHz processor and up to 10GB of memory (an optional 8GB memory card combined with 2GB internal memory). To access the Internet, users simply connect via the nearest Wi-Fi hotspot or over Bluetooth on a mobile phone.

The Nokia N810 also features GPS, with free maps preloaded for users to browse detailed locations, search for street addresses, find points of interest (POI) as well as nearby Wi-Fi hotspots.

The maemo Linux-based OS2008 features a highly customizable user interface and a Mozilla based browser with Ajax and Adobe flash 9.
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Dondero A Capella Choir (& Instrumentalists)

comfortstand.com reports: [edited]

"For me, it started one Saturday morning in 2002. On a whim I picked up two Dondero A Capella Choir cassettes at a thrift store, something to listen to in the car as I went about my errands.

"I got in the car, popped in a tape and "Black Water" started to play. As with so many ubiquitous pop songs, the Doobie Brothers' original never did much for me. It was just another pretty sound that might come over the loudspeakers at the supermarket. The Dondero version, however, pulled the song out of the background and shoved it right in front of me. Now I had context: knowing that high school students learned this song, rehearsed this song, performed it in front of family and friends finally made "Black Water" real to me as a piece of music.

"This ability to make tired old pop songs fresh is only part of what makes these concerts a such a pleasure to hear, however. There's real skill demonstrated here, and a palpable sense of excitement in this music. The students sound like they're having a great time on stage, and the audience is cheering and shouting with equal - if not more - enthusiasm."

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Visit the link for a chance to listen to, or download, the 'greatest hits' compilation. Or download one of the annual concerts complete with intros and outros.

Relax into the shaky timings and dodgy notes. Think Polyphonic Spree meets The Go! Team. Immerse yourself in the moment and find yourself smiling out loud at the enthusiasm and joy that these people are experiencing in playing, singing (and listening to) some of their favourite songs.
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Free fonts

Billy Argel has released a luxurious, surprisingly legible distressed script typeface. Olho de Boi was inspired by the first Brazilian postage stamp, released on August 1, 1843.

And if you're in the market for typefaces of this ilk, another Argel creation Santos Dumont might be worth a browse.
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Kindle

c|net reports: [edited]

Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos believes the Kindle will be to reading what the iPod was to music, according to a report published on the online edition of magazine.

In what appears to be the Bezos' first interview about the company's upcoming electronic reader, Amazon's chief told the magazine that the Kindle can store up to 200 books and connect to the Web with the help of a system called Whispernet. Amazon, a company that has become synonymous with buying books online, will also offer Kindle owners a selection of more than 88,000 digital books at launch time, according to Newsweek.

Last week, CNET News.com reported that Bezos will unveil the Kindle at a media event in New York on Monday. An industry source said that the device will retail for $399 and receive automatic downloads from major newspapers, magazines and other publications. The source also said that Kindle features e-mail.

The e-mail service enables owners to receive word documents or PDF files that can be stored in the device's library just like a book, Newsweek reported. But what makes the handheld truly unique is that it downloads books off the Web - and it can do that "in less than a minute," Bezos told the magazine.

E-readers used to confine e-book buyers to wherever their computers were located. Digital books had to be first downloaded to a PC and then synced to an e-reader. Amazon is freeing them to buy wherever they can connect to the Web and this could lead to more impulse purchases.

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Amazon have now officially launched it, visit this page for more details, including a video ad/demo
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Be prepared

Stephen Fry's excellent blog is always worth a read, but his latest (long) article is particularly enlightening. Here are some excerpts:

I expect all of you have heard of the risks posed by the various forms of attack code that go under names like virus, Trojan horse, worm, malware and so on. These are little bits of clandestine code that your computer picks up, usually through email attachments, designed to infect the host (your PC), raid its address books, send out copies of themselves to all your friends and contacts and then either spitefully screw with your operating system, rendering it inoperative or, more likely these days, record your keyboard input and send back to the malicious code’s originator a log of such keystrokes which can be used to determine your passwords, credit card numbers and other sensitive data.

But, and here I come to my nightmare scenario, imagine malicious code written by cunning, ruthless criminals that could turn your computer into a kind of slave machine, a zombie PC which can connect with other zombie PCs to create a whole network of robot computers which would grow almost exponentially in power and bandwidth. Such a robot network, or ‘botnet’, would soon overtake all the supercomputers on earth in might and reach.

Let us further imagine that this botnet learned to defend itself against the security forces by moving the location of its command and control centres so fast and so randomly that the head could never be cut off. Let us even further imagine that the criminal masterminds in charge of this colossal entity divided it up into sections which could be sold, leased or rented to other criminals (along with instructions for use) who could use it for spamming, share scamming, phishing, identity theft, fraud, DDoS and any other kind of lucrative enterprise they chose.

The fiendish nature of the code would mean infected PCs wouldn’t freeze or slow down noticeably, so individual computer users like you and me would have no idea that we were enslaved players in this vast criminal conspiracy, the transmission routes would change literally daily from porn sites to cheerful links or witty birthday cards and friendly pointers to interesting blog pages – anything. Those profiting would be almost impossible to catch and the entity itself, the botnet, would grow and refine itself until it became the very stuff of science fiction: the neural nets of William Gibson, Skynet in The Terminator films, the Borg collective in Star Trek, you know the genre.

Well, my (not very surprising) kick in the teeth is this. Such botnets exist and one of them, the Storm botnet, has grown so fast, so terrifyingly and so cunningly, that in the last eight months it has overtaken all the others. Storm is an amalgam of millions (no one knows quite how many) of slave PCs.

It sends out billions of spam messages, stock market scam mails and appears to be behind many examples of what are known as Distributed Denial of Service attacks, which for reasons of malice, politics or criminal extortion close down or threaten to close down legitimate servers by flooding them with more data traffic than they can handle. Using sci-fi sounding techniques like Fast Flux, Storm evades capture and surveillance and recent evidence leads those who know about these things to conclude that parts of it have indeed been leased or sold as ‘botkits’ to less technically savvy criminals.

Storm began life early this year, but as of a couple of weeks ago it had grown into easily the biggest and most sophisticated botnet the world has seen.

But according to The Honeynet Project, Dark Reading and other reliable sites that monitor this subject, Storm is only the beginning. In a year’s time it will in all likelihood seem naïve, clumsy and harmless. Slashdot carried this headline only the other day: “There’s a new peer-to-peer based botnet emerging that could blow the notorious Storm away in size and sophistication.”

So... Don’t trust those you don’t know. Don’t click on that alluring headline, that tempting YouTube link, that interesting ad, that funny sounding birthday card or joke unless you are one hundred percent certain of its origin.
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London, Lincoln, London 18-11-07

LONDON TO LINCOLN
Big Girls Don't Cry - Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons
Duel - Propaganda
Genie in a Bottle - Christina Aguilera
Johnny reggae - The Piglets
Philadelphia Freedom - Elton John
Hold Me Close - David Essex
Stuck In The Middle With You - Stealers Wheel
Smoke You Out - The Donnas
Rock Lobster - The B-52's
Hyperactive! - Thomas Dolby
I Only Want To Be With You - Dusty Springfield
It Doesn't Have To Be This Way - Blow Monkeys
We Built This City On Rock And Roll - Jefferson Starship
I Should Have Known Better - Jim Diamond
Cherish - Madonna
Locomotion - Kylie Minogue
Sweet Little Mystery - Wet Wet Wet
Beauty Queen - Lash
Sugar and Spice - The Cryan Shames
The most beautiful girl in the world - Charlie Rich
Ring My Bell - Anita Ward
Since U Been Gone - Kelly Clarkson
John, I'm Only Dancing - David Bowie
A Chicken with Its Head Cut Off - The Magnetic Fields
Let The Music Play - Shannon
The Wrath of Marcie - The Go! Team
Getting To Know You - Julie Andrews
National Express - The Divine Comedy
One vision - Queen
Martian Hop - The Ran-Dells
Silence (DJ Tiesto's In Search Of Sunrise Remix) - Sarah McLachlan
Sign Of The Times - Belle Stars
Down Under - Men At Work
My Boyfriend's Back - The Angels
You Spin Me Around - Gigi D'Agostino
Together In Electric Dreams - Human League
Lovin' each day - Ronan Keating
I Think I Love You - Partridge Family
Stacy's Mom - Fountains Of Wayne
pizza day - Aquabats
Little Yellow Spider - Devendra Banhart
Wannabe - Spice Girls
Mixed Up World - Sophie Ellis-Bextor
What Is Love - Haddaway

LINCOLN TO LONDON
Your Excuse - Slobberbone
Screwdriver - The White Stripes
Backlash Blues - Nina Simone
Trouble - The Jayhawks
I'm Free - Soup Dragons
Shadow Blues - Laura Veirs
Awesome God - Rich Mullins
Swamp - Télépopmusik
Turning Away - Shakin' Stevens
Imagine - T.T. Ross
Broken Butterflies - Lucinda Williams
We Both Go Down Together - The Decemberists
Crazy Dreams - Lucy Kaplansky
Home (Air "Around the Golf" Mix) - Depeche Mode
Hazy Jane II - Nick Drake
Warm Love - Van Morrison
One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer - John Lee Hooker
When Tomorrow Comes - Eurythmics
A House For Sale - Millie Jackson
More Than a Feeling - The Moog Cookbook
I Think You And I - Skip Spence
Vampire - Juliet Turner
Plan 9 Channel 7 - The Damned
Stumblin' In - Suzi Quattro & Chris Norman
Drops Me Down - Lisa Loeb
Biological - Air
Had Me A Real Good Time - The Faces
Big Area - Then Jerico
Unemployed In Summertime - Emiliana Torrini
Los Endos - Genesis
Hardin Wouldn't Run - Steve Earle
Rednecks - Randy Newman
On The Beach - Neil Young
Big Wheel - Laura Cantrell
Hard Life - Bonnie 'Prince' Billy
Comanche - Cake
Surfin' USM - Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine
Homeless - Paul Simon
Jupiter Rising - Emmylou Harris
The Things That Dreams Are Made Of - Human League
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London, Lincoln, London 17-11-07

LONDON TO LINCOLN
You Will Always Be The Same - Ryan Adams
Green Summer Lawn - Vigilantes Of Love
Maundering - Bonnie 'Prince' Billy
Jack Shit George - Ian Dury & The Blockheads
Kanon - Enon
I'm The Leader Of The Gang - Gary Glitter
Never Knew Love Like This Before - Stephanie Mills
Taxman - The Beatles
Big Girls Don't Cry - Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons
Memphis Pearl - Lucinda Williams
Paralyzed - Bob Mould
It Must Be Love - Labi Siffre
Taa Deem - Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
Live Bed Show - Pulp
The Beauty Of The Days Gone By - Van Morrison
Stuck In The Middle With You - Louise
Green, Green Grass Of Home (live at Folsom Prison) - Johnny Cash
Troubled So Hard - Vera Hall
Listen To The Radio - Nanci Griffith
I Got A Feeling - Barbara Randolph
Down To Zero - Bettye Lavette
Is it Peace or Is it Prozac? - Cheryl Wheeler
Every Rose Has Its Thorn - Rex Hobart And The Misery Boys
Girls Dem Sugar (feat Mya) - Beenie Man
I Am Your Tambourine - Tift Merritt
Liar - Deana Carter
Nu Rip Off - The Kleptones
Born To A Family - The Go-Betweens
Merry-Go-Round - Gunilla Thorn
Sonny Could Lick All Them Cats - Chuck E. Weiss
Shting-Shtang - Nick Lowe
She Came In Through The Bathroom Window - The Beatles
In The Midnight - Van Morrison
Hallelujah Jordan - Hothouse Flowers
Inside - Patti Rothberg
There Was Love - Charlie Peacock
Reefer Madness - UB40
The Nursery Walls - The Lilac Time
Ireland For Losers - Jackie Leven
Computerlove - Kraftwerk
Terminator X To The Edge Of Panic - Public Enemy
Kiss - Prince
High Water - Bob Dylan
One Moment More - Mindy Smith

LINCOLN TO LONDON
Are You Ready for Love - Elton John
What's New Pussycat? - Los Fabulosos Cadillacs & Fishbone
Working My Way Back To You Babe - Spinners
I Love You 'Cause I Have To - Dogs Die In Hot Cars
Rawhide - The Blues Brothers
Breakthru - Queen
(excerpt from) Jack and the Beanstalk - Children's Disco Musical Stories
Fast Food song - Fast Food Rockers
I Don't Care - 7" Remix - Shakespear's Sister
Breakin' Up - Rilo Kiley
Don’t Look Back Into The Sun - The Libertines
Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini - Frankie Avalon
Queen of the World - Ida Maria
Don't You Want Me - Human League
Self-Defence - Monty Python
Give Him A Great Big Kiss - Shangri-Las
Still Alive (credits to Portal) - Ellen McLain
Redneck Girl - Gretchen Wilson
Better When You're Naked - Ida Maria
I'm Finding It Harder To Be A Gentleman - The White Stripes
Happy People - R. Kelly
Mansard Roof - Vampire Weekend
Foundations - Kate Nash
My Life - Billy Joel
Babylon's Burning The Ghetto - Lethal Bizzle
Voyage Voyage - Desireless
Feel the Beat - Darude
Letter from America - The Proclaimers
Ruby - Kaiser Chiefs
I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You - Black Kids
Yoda (parody of Lola, kinks) - Weird Al Yankovic
I Can't Go For That - Daryl Hall & John Oates
Everytime We Touch - Cascada
Monsters and Angels - Voice of the Beehive
N Apostrophe T - Tom Lehrer
Only You Can - Fox
Up The Bracket - The Libertines
Shang-A-Lang - Bay City Rollers
A Glass Of Champagne - Sailor
The Duel - Giorgio Moroder
Shake ur body - Shy FX & T-Power feat. Di
Sugar Sugar - Archies
Brother Louie - Modern Talking
Louie - Ida Maria
Ladies Of Cambridge - Vampire Weekend
Staring At The Rude Boys - The Ruts
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Asus Eee PC 4G 701 micro-laptop

Reg Hardware reports: [edited]

Asus' new micro-laptop runs on Linux, has Wi-Fi and 4GB of flash storage, of which around 2.9GB is consumed by the OS, bundled apps and sample files.

An advantage to using Linux is that it's easier to make the OS fit the screen. The 701's 7in, 100dpi, LED-backlit, 800 x 480 screen isn't a standard resolution, but there are pixels aplenty to ensure dialogue boxes don't disappear off the bottom of the screen as they almost always did with early Windows-based UMPCs. Any that do can usually be resized to fit the screen with just a click. Windows, rather than dialogue boxes, open full-screen by default, but it's easy to switch between them using the tabs in the status bar at the bottom of the screen.

Typing on the 701 is certainly possible, but if your fingers aren't those of a five-year-old, it'll take a bit of practice to make sure you hit the letter you want and not the adjacent keys as well. But all the keys you'd get on a full-sized model are present.

If the keyboard's hard to use, that goes double for the touchpad. A mere 45 x 30mm, it's got a scroll space over on the right-hand side, but that just makes it ever fiddlier to use.

The 701 has three USB ports, a VGA port and SD/SDHC card slot. The other side is home to 3.5mm headphone and microphone sockets and a 10/100Mb Ethernet port.

Closed, the 701 measures 225 x 165 x 25-35mm, but in real terms that means it's the size of a typical hardback novel. It weighs about the same, 890g. In other words, eminently portable, and a perfect size to close up and stash away in your backpack or briefcase when you've finished surfing, writing the latest chapter of your magnum opus or whatever.

At just £220 [camera, model and straw mat not included, Ed.], the Asus Eee PC is a steal. This is a fun, cheap machine.

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Editor's postscript: Someone has managed to install Mac OSX on one of these. Bet he doesn't have much room for his iTunes collection.
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Nokia N82

Mobile Burn reports: [edited]

Nokia have announced the N82, featuring a 5 megapixel camera with Xenon flash, autofocus, and a Carl Zeiss lens. It is also capable of recording video at VGA resolution, at 30 frames per second.

The handset has quad-band GSM and WCDMA (2100MHz) support. Data connectivity options include HSDPA and WiFi.

The N82 sports a GPS receiver in addition to Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP support for stereo headsets. The 3.5mm audio jack accommodates standard headphones and can be used with a TV-out cable for displaying videos and photos on a television.

The Nokia N82 measures 112 x 50 x 17mm and weighs 114g. There is a microSD memory card slot with support for capacities up to 8GB. The display is a 2.4" 16 million color TFT screen, with 240 x 320 pixel resolution.

A second front-facing VGA camera is included for video calls. The Nokia N82 costs around £300.
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Drobo - intelligent, expandable backup

drobo.com reports: [edited]

As rich media (photos, video, movies, music) continues to devour your storage capacity, you need a solution that allows you to easily manage, protect, and scale storage for your PC or Mac. For you, we've created Drobo, the first fully-automated storage robot to take the pain out of keeping your important digital content safe.

Drobo guards everything on it.
Drobo combines up to four hard drives into a big pool of protected storage. Start with two, grow to four, then upsize smaller drives-get Terabytes of protection.

Drobo manages storage, so you don't have to.
Just connect Drobo to your Mac or PC. No RAID levels. No management or configuration. Drobo does everything for you. Get rid of multiple external drives. Avoid the complexity of RAID. Attach a Drobo storage robot to your system and let it manage your storage so you don't have to.

Drobo upgrades capacity on-the-fly.
Add drives to Drobo at any time. Mix 'n match capacities, brands or speeds. No downtime, data migration, or waiting to access new capacity. Drobo works the way you do.

Drobo lets you "pay as you grow"
Hard drives get bigger and cheaper all the time. Don't buy storage capacity until you need it.
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Dorothy gets a laptop

kansascity.com reports: [edited]

A new era began Tuesday when the Kansas City School District launched the largest distribution of laptops in the metro area.

The school board earlier this year agreed to purchase Apple MacBooks for all of its 5,000 high school students to use at school and at home.

The project aims to better prepare students for college. Principals have lamented for years about their students not having computers at home, fearing they will be behind their peers by the time they get to college.

“Laptop computers will help us to teach each student at their instructional level, so that they can find success,” said Susan Engelmann, a district administrator who oversees the high schools.

The school district required parents and students to attend an orientation session about the rules and expectations for using the laptops.

The school district paid about $6.4 million for the lease. Parents are responsible for the $25 insurance fee. For those unable to pay, the district allows community service as a substitute payment.

The laptops are equipped with software to prevent students from viewing pornography, but parents are also expected to help keep track of Internet usage.

District officials have taken several measures to prevent theft. All of the laptops have stickers clearly identifying them as the property of the Kansas City, Kan., public schools. The sticker will not come off without virtually destroying the laptop.

If thieves find a way around that obstacle, a GPS tracking device will help locate it. If all else fails, district officials said, they could also use a remote device to destroy the hard drive.
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Strapline for Britain

As Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown is seeking to set the agenda by choosing a 'Motto for Britain', chosen by a "citizens' summit" of 1,000 people, allowing it to be "truly representative" of Britishness rather than have it imposed by ministers or a team of highly-paid consultants.

Members of the public will be asked to come up with five or six-word slogans, perhaps based around ideas of fair play or national pride.

Sources described the plan as a "once in a lifetime chance" to capture Britishness in a few words.

Times Online readers have responded with a few of their own, including...

"Great people, great country, Great Britain"

"Courage, reason, humanity, democracy, monarchy"

Some are wary of any sign of nationalism, warning:

"Pride comes before a fall".

And others have grabbed the chance to have a dig at Brown:

"Taxation without Representation is Tyranny"

"Created by heroes, destroyed by Labour"

"Our government no longer listens".

Nostalgia for the empire also runs deep, with suggestions such as:

"Wallowing in a post-colonial miasma"

"Once mighty empire, slightly used".

But most contributors seem to favour engaging in the popular national sport of self deprecation.

"Drinking continues until morale improves"

"Our glass is half empty"

"Dipso fatso bingo ASBO Tesco".

"Sorry it's all our fault"

"We apologise for the inconvenience"

and the one that made me laugh out loud...

"At least we're not French"
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