Oh m'god I want one! can you rig the crank to attach to a stationary bicycle?

The hand crank is a good idea: they're clearly putting thought into the hardware design.

To play the devil's advocate, though: are they putting as much thought into how (and why) these are being used? Certainly a hundred-dollar laptop is an exciting idea - and Negroponte does declare that this is a project in education, not one in technology - but how much thought is gone into the education part of the equation? That's a more slippery concept, and I think that's where this will succeed or fail.

The question of "why": I do worry that their ground assumption might be that "poor people need computers" which can be expanded to "poor people need computers to be like us" and I think that's where I find this maybe problematic. Are we merely prepping the third world for American-style capitalism? Others are certainly more qualified than I to address this, but I don't see it addressed.

Two data points:

• In today's NYTimes: Karen Hughes is astonished to find that Saudi women might not want to be like Americans.
• At the Transliteracies conference last June, Walter Bender (of the MIT Media Lab) declared that "five billion people around the world are learning English right now".

In both, the implied assumption is what the rest of the world really wants is to be like us, which turns out not to be the case in Saudi Arabia. I think Bender's attitude towards languages is deeply problematic; if not explicitly racist, it's certainly arrogant, possibly dangerously so (cue Karen Hughes). The flip side of this kind of Anglocentrism is death for pre-existing cultures.

Another data point, incidentally related, but perhaps illustrative of the question of how these things will be used: it turns out that you can't type Bengali properly under OS X – vowels that are supposed to display to the left of consonants or around them don't correctly place themselves. Nobody's bothered to provide support for a language spoken & written by 200 million people on the Mac (which generally has quite good foreign language font support). If nobody at Apple (with all their resources) has thought to do this for the Mac, has anyone bothered to for Linux?

I'm not positing this as a particular problem that needs to be solved (although one does note that their mockup has an American keyboard). Rather, it's indicative of the sort of problem that needs to be solved. Nobody is going to get excited about providing Bengali font support – it's certainly not exciting like a hundred-dollar laptop is &ndash but the majority of the people in Bangladesh whose lives feasibly could be improved by a project like this won't be helped if nobody's bothered to see if it works in their language.

Technology by itself is not enough. This can't be said often enough.

I agree with much of the above, but in the end you have to come down somewhere. What Negroponte's project is doing is laying down the infrastructure, for good or for ill. I too am wary of grand western schemes to remake the poor brown south in its image. And that could well be what's going on here (I certainly hope Bender isn't a part of this). But I'm encouraged by the fact that that they are using free software, that they are thinking about how to make machines that can generate their own energy. This is a push toward self-sufficiency. It strikes me more as the "teach a man to fish" variety of philanthropy.

This is certainly not the approach that Microsoft would take. They'd do everything in their power to turn these people into dependent customers, dependent on support, hooked up to the little "updates" nutrient bag like an IV drip. It would be nice if all human beings could leave each other in peace. But there are big games of exploitation going on. The $100 laptop project has the potential at least to be a hack of this exploitation. To exploit benignly. To exploit in such a way that provides the tools for throwing off the yoke, and for throwing off Karen Hughes' idea of what it is to be free and happy. If some of these kids turn into bloggers and start telling the west, on the machines they provided, about what a raw deal it is down there, about how they're using this technology to determine their own future, that would be a great hack indeed, one that would surprise Negroponte, and positively mystify Bender.

Our best hope is that the $100 laptops prove to be the lesser of two (or more) evils. The world, after all, is the world.

About the Mac/Bengali/Linux thing. The idea of open source software is not that a specific group of researchers type code that is then consumed by others, but that whoever has time and access to write code will. It is true that time and access exist in a far greater abundance in the global north, but the whole point of this machine and project seems to be the alleviation of problems of access. Sadly enough access to self-determination still lies in the nation-state structure. Courting self-determination without access to computers in this age seems like a losing battle.

Some fascinating ideas, especially Kim's.

Social and language problems aside, I have to wonder how heavy the power rod/screen is in comparison to the keyboard; doesn't it look like this should be falling over backwards?

Also, how easily will the software on this translate to the PC world? Will we be able to seamlessly move documents from one to the other? What about Word? All this has to be figured out first, otherwise, it WILL fall flat.

-E

http://www.infowars.com/articles/bb/gov_caught_installing_keystroke_loggers.htm

..."Computer manufacturers appear to be cooperating with the Department of Homeland Security to make every person who buys a new computer subject to immediate, unrestricted government recording of everything they do on those computers! EVERYTHING! ...."

PHOTOS SHOW HARDWARE FOUND IN COMPUTERS AND LETTER FROM DHS IN RESPONSE)

Keylog hardware is installed in new computers and all info being sent to Homeland Security

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Recently.... MIT annouces $100 laptops (and yes, we all know about the military funded labs of MIT)......San Francisco is trying to do free wireless access to all the boys and girls AND the above.............(free) hardware installed for the Big Brother's in DC....................it all just starts connecting up to the "master plan" of ultra spying on America.

I would think making sure everyone is online would make is so much easier for this White House regime to find the dissenters!

Beware of strangers bearing gifts!