News-A low-cost laptop for every child

The CSM has this

• Effort to link the world's rural poor to the Internet with a $100 computer gets a boost from the United Nations.
  By Christa Case | Staff writer of The Christian Science Mon
• In Cambridge, Mass., Nicholas Negroponte and his team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been chipping away at a long-held dream: producing a laptop so cheap that governments could afford to link every child in the world to the Internet...... Five corporate sponsors, including Google and Advanced Micro Devices, have chipped in $2 million apiece to form a nonprofit group, One Laptop Per Child, to oversee the project. Nearly a half-dozen developing countries have expressed serious interest in ordering 1 million or more units, says Alexandra Kahn, spokeswoman for the MIT Media Lab.

They have the cost down to 130 bucks per machine now. The article has a picture of a prototype. As I read the article I thought this is a good idea, but why not make sure all American kids have one too. There is hope, as it adds

• American students could benefit, too. Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has proposed a $54 million program to equip each of his state's 500,000 middle- and high-schoolers with the laptops, which the students would be allowed to keep. Other states may follow suit. OLPC officials estimate they'll need another six months to complete development of the machine. Production will begin in the third quarter of 2006, with distribution late next year or early in 2007, says Ms. Kahn.

I hope other states jump on this also. You would think Bill Gates would jump onboard to help. That does not sound like it is going to happen as the article says the computers will run free Linux software. Heh. 100 dollar puters that are " full-color, capable of wireless connection to the Internet, and rugged enough to survive getting dropped in the mud."

Very Cool