Is this it?
porn, pirated movies, and free mp3's for the children of the world!
Far out, I want one. That being said, do starving, uneducated children need laptops?
Heaven forbid they start by doing it right here in the US.
But will they do Grand Theft Auto?
Really? I would be more than satisfied with "practically indestructible".
Yeah, but can you send it down the slide w/out killing it? And anything with a handcrank can be broken by a child no matter how much rubber you wrap around it.
Another liberal wet dream...(the most prominent one is West Wing, closely followed by Commander-in-Chief, with an aside real-story backdrop of GW getting caught with a 12 year old boy, enflagrante, mais qui!!!!!
Several years ago I worked with the now-defunct Teledesic project, which billed itself as "the internet in space." One of their biggest goals -- pursued with an almost religious fervor -- was to provide cheap internet access to places where there were no phones. They had a very pleasant-looking market model showing how much money they could make off of this huge "un-served market."
Somehow they never stopped to realize that if there was really a market in those places, there'd already be phones and internet access..... (Iridium and Globalstar went bankrupt for much the same reason.)
Mr. Negraponte's got a great idea here -- but the real market would be people like us.
What's a computer?
I think it's a great idea. I agreed 100% with Newt Gingrich when he suggested like 10 years ago that it would be a hell of a lot more effective (and not much more expensive) for the government to buy a computer for each child in America than to buy computers for each classroom and then watch as the computer doesn't add a damn thing to classroom instruction.
this is a liberal at work here. conservatives are not this stupid. nor are they this deluded about whether a computer will change these people's lives.
You give every kid in the world a laptop with access to the Internet and I can guarantee you that you won’t have a problem with a lack of “hank cranking”.
"connect to Wi-Fi wireless networks and be part of "mesh" networks in which each laptop would relay data to and from other devices, reducing the need for expensive base stations."
I can see the bot makers and SPAM purveyors salivating at that thought. Millions of uncontrolled laptops in a mesh network. That would be one heck of a Zombie network...
Not a lot of wisdom coming from such a 'smart' guy. :-)
What was that little computer at Radio Shack years ago? Chicklet keyboard, color display, real cheap, for kids.
The $100 laptop computers that Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers want to get into the hands of the world's children would be durable, flexible and self-reliant.
Hmmm, does second or third childhood count?
Oh man, I'll bet those are real fast. You ever try to download a porn film with one of those P.C.s that have processors that belong in an ATM? It takes forever. And if this is for kids, how are they going to play Halo or Madden '05 on a machine with 16 megs of ram? This is a total waste. Won't be five minutes before Suvash is tossing it in the trash "It locks up every time I try to open this Anna Nicole Smith jpg."
Owl_Eagle(If what I just wrote makes you sad or angry,
This is not engineering, this is social engineering. What better way to broadcast the World Communist Vision Satellite Network to billions of little boxes in front of a future army of fellow travelers.
Is that cost? Is a reasonable margin included? Warranty?