[lotrfan55345]

Its good it doesnt have an HD, it cant break from the third-world conditions there.
But they could've made the flash mass storage a bit bigger

[gampy]

I think for the applications they envisage for these laptops, it'll be quite powerful. They won't be playing Doom 3, or downloading gigabytes of porn. Although I can see some kids trying.

Plus it won't be running Windows. That lumbering mastodon takes up as much resources as most of the apps it runs. I think the developer mentioned the word "featuritis". It will be slim, trim, and free of the crap the average person wants. I believe that they want it to be as customizable and flexible as the kids will be. I can see some kids only using to talk to their friends, while some will get the hacker bug, and play with the operating system. While I can see the benfits of this in an information based economy, I can't see it working too good in a third world, agrarian society. I think they are a little too optimistic about the fate and prospects, of the countries they are planning it for.

[smallpoxgirl]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('lotrfan55345', 'B')ut they could've made the flash mass storage a bit bigger

[nemo]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('eric_b', '{') crusty old man voice }

blablabla

[Chuckmak]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('smallpoxgirl', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('lotrfan55345', 'B')ut they could've made the flash mass storage a bit bigger

[frankthetank]

SO at some point, you and i are going to be able to REALLY purchase one of these things? I want one too! Won't they get bidded up on ebay? What kind of battery do they have/or do they not have one?

[smallpoxgirl]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('nemo', 'T')each a man to fish, and all that.

[nemo]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('smallpoxgirl', 'W')e can't all be sitting around in starched shirts in office buildings clicking away on computers. Somebody has to do actual work or we're all going to starve.

[TommyJefferson]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('nemo', '[')One laptop per child won't fix everything, but fact remains that there are loads of very poor, very poorly educated people living in places that could improve tremendously with knowledge combined with political reform, and networking portable computers on an open source platform is a beautiful idea for accomplishing this in my opinion.

[grabby]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('gampy', 'G')uys...these are designed for children in the 6-12 age range. They are teaching aids, and toys designed for kids.
The idea was to have a cool teaching aid, and gateway to the world wide web for the poorest of the world's children. I hope you don't plan on "buying" one, because you'll just be taking one from the hands of some kid in Uganda, or Bangladesh.

[I_Like_Plants]

$150......

That's a good set of encyclopedias, that the whole village can share.

That's education on birth control, disease prevention, etc.

That's a cheap but effective radio station.

That's a bicycle or two.

That's a squatload of children's books, again that the whole village can share.

Thinking that putting a laptop in the lap of every human on the planet is a DISEASE. It reminds me of nothing so much as how our civilization is one big party on a large, sinking ship, and the people running it are busily shooting holes in the bottoms of the small native boats around us and compelling the natives in them to join our party or else they are also shot.

[gg3]

Most of y'all are missing the point so badly that if "the point" was a bus you'd never get to work. Nemo came closest to getting it.

In a nutshell it's this:

Education is the trojan horse.

What's inside the trojan horse is freedom of speech, press, and assembly.

Yes, that's right: these little green things are going to give an entire generation of kids the means to liberate themselves from the obscurantist bullshit that presently enslaves their entire societies.

Obscurantist bullshit such as what's promulgated by various Popes and Mullahs and Nigerian Bishops.

Obscurantist bullshit such as male ownership of women ("domination" hardly does justice to the depravity of practices such as female genital mutilation and the inability to say No to a husband who's spent the afternoon screwing AIDS-infested pre-teen prostitutes).

Obscurantist bullshit such as what the various warlords and wannabe-warlords are either foisting on their people or waiting patiently for the chance to foist on their people.

Obscurantist bullshit such as the idea that the tribe across the river are subhumans who deserve to be burned alive, as in Rwanda and Dharfur.

Think back to the days before the Pentagon handed the entire world our First Amendment on a silver platter in the form of the Internet.

Think of what it took to get an article published, much less a book, in those days. If you had inside connections you were lucky; everyone else practically had to submit to "horizontal diplomacy" before their words had even a teeny-tiny chance of being conveyed to the world-at-large.

Compare to today: $10 gets you a domain name and a little more gets you a website and the next thing you know, the world is your audience.

How much did it cost Aaron to set up this site? How many countries are represented among us right here in this obscure little corner of cyberspace? How many ideas have we been exposed to, that we would not have heard the first word of otherwise?

And best of all, freedom of speech. press, and assembly does not require the latest multi-gigahertz processor or gazillion gigabit drive or even Steve or Bill's newest creation, nice though all of them may be. All that it takes to liberate an individual and a society is text.

And if the kids occasionally catch a glimpse of a digitized bare breast, all the better because they will also discover that bare breasts will not bring down lightning bolts from the heavens. And so those kids will grow up to tell the Mullahs et. al. to go get stuffed.

Somewhere out there are more Nelson Mandelas, more Desmond Tutus, more people with the potential to transform their societies and advance the moral evolution of all of humanity in the process. Ubiquitous digital communication does not create such people, but it does give them a tool with which to multiply their effectiveness.

Teach a kid to read & write, and hand her or him a communications device that works with reading & writing, and the rest, as they say, will be history.

[I_Like_Plants]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('nemo', '
')In my utopia nobody sits in front of computers, and starched shirts are never worn by anybody. Your example of nomad is kindof extreme, but I'm sure a primitive computer network could improve anyone's quality of life, if only for sending an IM to your neighbor rather than sending a child as a messenger.
I see this laptop project as a seed of something bigger to come. I dream of a future of interconnected people, rich and poor alike, using augmented/mixed reality interfaces to improve our abilities to do just about anything, on our feet, rather than parking our increasingly fat asses in front of flourescent screens, enslaving our bodies to our computers. We're not there yet, and this is just a step.

[nemo]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('gg3', 'g')reat big rant

[gg3]

Ha, Nemo, sounds like what you want isn't a computer, it's psilocybin mushrooms:-)

The XO/Sugar OS and interface also has significant subversive potential, and I say this having read quite a bit about the design, the specs, and the discussion around same. In short, it's no longer the office/desk/filing cabinet metaphor, but the outdoor/playspace/playing with friends metaphor. A slightly more "grownup"-looking version of that could have the same transformative potential as the original Apple Macintosh did in its day.

[I_Like_Plants]

Yeah? I fucking HATE computers. They're better than anything in our present McWorld, so it's easy to understand the allure but they're not better than:

Lying on the ground watching an anthill and having all afternoon to do it.

Fishing.

Sex.

Good face to face conversation.

Playing a musical instrument.

Walking along a trail and gathering eatable stuff.

Throwing a stick like a spear at a target or throwing dirt clods at the little dirt clods that stick up, that is really cool.

Surfing - whether board, boogieboard, paipo board, bodysurfing.

Sailing even in the most lame sailboat like a Sabot or Lido.

Reading a really good book. It's not the same on-screen.

The global Machine has made sure these things can't be enjoyed any more. They can, but somehow no one ever has the time, too busy working their asses off for the Machine, sorry. Rich ppl can, if you financially rape enough other people you get to do a little bit of that stuff, stuff we all used to do for free.

[Auntie_Cipation]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Dreamtwister', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('TommyJefferson', 'I') could carry it when motorcycle camping to check my email.

[TommyJefferson]

+1

I don't have a cell phone. I hate them. It's like a shackle and leash.

That's why my kids have them.

[TommyJefferson]

I believe Ebay is the absolute BEST place to get the real scoop on how the US economy is performing. Economic problems would appear first among these bottom-feeders like myself who are super sensitive to price increases and declines in purchasing power.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('I_Like_Plants', 'W')ho knows..... but sales on Ebay are off a cliff.

[Plantagenet]

USPS postage for package shipping just went up.

So the price of everything on EBAY effectively went up.