$100 Laptop: Great for the world, great for Linux (ZDNet)

$100 Laptop: Great for the world, great for Linux (ZDNet)

Posted Feb 4, 2006 23:04 UTC (Sat) by h2 (guest, #27965)
In reply to: $100 Laptop: Great for the world, great for Linux (ZDNet) by bk
Parent article: $100 Laptop: Great for the world, great for Linux (ZDNet)

sbergman and bk, it's nice to see that lwn has some nice common sense among it's visitors.

I totally agree, this scheme is really strange, definitely hatched out of some ivy league setting where people think that computers are the source of well-being etc.

I have a good friend who's worked in africa for years off and on, kids not having a laptop would not even hit top 10 of things they need to function. Sometimes the west can be phenomenally clueless.

Among things she told me, everything breaks, it doesn't get fixed. Especially computers. Computers are nice tools, especially for computer related topics, email is a mediocre way to communicate, there are far more important, and realistic things, to do.

But I'm sure the blackmarkets of those countries where they spread these things will figure out something to do with them, those windup radios became like that, a status symbol, would get you laid if you could get one.

What is it they say? The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I can just see it now, some home grown group realizes that with these cheap machines they can establish a network of terrorist cells that floats under the radar, whatever. Not that I'm paranoid about that type of thing happening, or buy into the hysteria put out along those lines, it's just a likely outcome if they ended up getting used at all, that's what happened when satellite cell phones hit the second and third world.

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