OLPC project

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

Anyone seen the One Laptop per Child project?

Introducing the children's laptop from One Laptop per Child—a potent learning tool created expressly for the world's poorest children living in its most remote environments. The laptop was designed collaboratively by experts from both academia and industry, bringing to bear both extraordinary talent and many decades of collective field experience in every aspect of this non-profit humanitarian project. The result is a unique harmony of form and function; a flexible, ultra low-cost, power-efficient, responsive, and durable machine with which nations of the emerging world can leapfrog decades of development—immediately transforming the content and quality of their children's learning.

a related opinion is on hamfisted.net with some additional links and pictures of the laptop itself.

Notable is this line:

The unit itself has a 500Mhz CPU, 128MB of DRAM, 500MB of Flash memory, four USB ports, a webcam, WiFi and can run in color or black and white display modes. It runs Linux, and even has a hand crank for generating power when off the grid.

As hamfisted.net said, who knows what a million ultra-poor kids will do with such a thing? It's also designed to easily hook into the internet wirelessly, should the owner find themselves near a wireless hotspot.

We truly live in interesting times...