Applications

Home Automation

X10.com

MicroAutomata.com

Cameras

OpenRaw

Telephones

Openmoko is a GSM mobile phone that uses GNU and Linux as well as some new Free Software toolkits;
http://www.openmoko.org/

Voting Machines

Open Voting Foundation supports solutions for open voting. These solutions include software using open standard specifications that can be inspected by the public for flaws and even improved by the public. The software must also capture and count votes in ways that the voter can verify individually and would be statistically impossible to tamper with on any significant scale.

Diebold voting machines critically flawed

Steven Heller says 'Diebold Cannot be Trusted to Run Elections in America' (from Brad Blog.)

Diebold vs North Carolina Board of Elections

Election Problem Log

Black Box Voting (this .Com site is not the same as Bev Harris .Org site of the same name.).

One Laptop per Child

Video of a prototype at SIGGRAPH

Desktop Machine

See Desktop page.

Healthcare

"The cost of caring for the elderly is huge and will only grow as our population ages. Of the $440,000 the average American spends on health care in his lifetime, $280,000 will be spent after age 65.

Probably 50% of that post-65 outlay goes to assisted-living facilities and nursing homes. So it stands to reason that if there were a way to keep elderly patients in their own homes longer - without degrading quality of care - we'd have a cheaper and better system.

And we can do just that using technology. I'm talking everyday, low-cost technology - the sensors, microchips, small radios you'd find in today's PCs, in cellphones, and in Bluetooth earpieces. It's not too difficult to use this stuff as monitoring tools. Not to spy, but to detect trouble. For example, did the patient go outside to get the newspaper or did she wander away? Has the patient taken his meds? The same technology that brings us HBO can watch over the patient and trigger human intervention when needed.

A critical step to make this happen is to have it blessed - and reimbursed - by the dominant health-care supplier to the aged, Medicare. Candidates, I hope to see a phrase in your inauguration speech that starts like this: "I will have Medicare define specifications for electronic equipment that allows the average aging citizen to stay home two years longer than today." Andy Grove

 

Bibliography

Business Guide to Free Information Technology by Tim Jowers and Contributors

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