-- The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is doing far more good for the children of Africa than anything Nicholas Negroponte is doing. Disease and hunger trump everything, including education, and sending millions of laptops to malnourished, disease ridden children is naive in its good intentions. Everyone knows what Dante said about good intentions too. The Gates Foundation is actually doing something about curbing disease and hunger, and say what you will about BG, I never hear any self-congratulations out of him on how generous and sensitive he is.

@WMF I totally symphathize with your disgust on this, and a lot of this project is ridiculous. But I don't agree that just continuing to feed and clean people (while step #1) is going to ever fix the problems long term. They need something to learn, something to make themselves better and self sustaining, and that is through education. I doubt most of them will become sys admins for Cisco just by having a OLPC but they might get an office job rather than eeking a living out of the dry dirt....

Man, I remember when they made us read Negroponte's Being Digital in school back in 1994.

He came off, not as a Fuller-esque visionary, but more of a digital age huckster, promising hours of free time to pursue our real desires thanks to the computer and Internet.

As he was totally off base about the "freedoms" the digital age would bring about (we're not tied to our desks any less) he's totally off base with OLPC. I mean, how do you end up turning something that should've been successful into what was percieved as digital-age colonialism?

It's pretty clear Negroponte needs to find someone working in the basement of his ivory tower to give him a reality check if he wants to further cultivate this "man of the people in this digital age" persona.

@michaellamb - Oh I don't disagree that people need to learn in Africa, and everywhere else for that matter. I just think that the problems in Africa with disease and starvation are so overwhelming and pervasive that much of the continent is not ready for the laptop stage yet. I'll bet in America, where believe it or not kids of welfare get enough to eat, these kids would have more use for a laptop. However, conceptual flaws are the least of this project's problems, as the project is fighting with everyone involved.

@TeenageCaveman - I read the book too and came away thinking the same thing. People promised the same things with the advent of the car, the washer and dryer, vacuum cleaner. No matter what is invented, there always seems to be some level of paradoxical drudgery to go with the convenience it provides.

Hey -- I think smacking Negroponte is on target -- but I know Mary Low Jepsen, and she has a particular lightweight ego-to-stature ratio. She's *incredibly* self effacing (and pretty smart).

So, not sure what you're basing this on -- but she's been interested in display technology for at least ten years prior to the OLPC stuff (since I remember talkign to her about this back in the 90's) - so it's not like going off and doing a company around this is an ego play.

Anyway, there are enough ego ridden people around here without ladling that carge out on someone who isn't

Like Deep Throat says, there's as much sense in "one laptop per child" as there is to the Wikididdlers' claim that they're compiling The World's Most Comprehensive List of Alien Races in The Star Wars Expanded Universe (as Owen would write) for "the child in Africa, facing crushing poverty..."

I hate to be a prick about it but some of these efforts remind me of the plague of "online petitions": they not only don't do a damn thing, but they make people who participate in them believe they actually *are* doing their part.

@michaellamb: Well, even you must admit that it's difficult to educate people who've already died. Subsistence is the priority in Africa right now.

FYI, I tried one of these laptops at the Northern Voice conference and it was very slick. It's also faster and more stable than what I'm typing this on right now. Maybe I should move?

Negroponte should reconsider offering the hand or foot crank generator just so a third party vendor can market well pump and grain grinding accessories…

Negroponte's goal is apparently not helping children, but fucking over MSFT. I suspect if he were more clear about that in his materials he'd get a lot more donations from the Mountain View area...

Sucks for Africa though.

If only the scumbags in the midwest knew how much their god-given farm subsidies fuck over Africa...

You're asking the wrong questions! Negroponte wants this to be an free and open source project, but who can afford that at this grand scale? You need money to move a project like this. "One lisence per child" is who's idea?

If you want to know who fucks over Africa and the rest of the developmenting world it's GE and the other patent strong corporations from the US. Taking patents on seeds farmers depend upon. Taking patents on life itself. Do you realise how close GE was to get a patent on the human genome?