Tuesday, October 04, 2005

Laptops to the people

Nicholas Negroponte is promoting an effort to bring computers to all children of the world. One laptop per child is his goal, and to do so he is cooperating with several companies to both get the computers as cheap and easy to use as possible, and to slim down the programs so that the software will not be as demanding as it is today. The goal is to produce this laptop for less than 100$.

Only catch: you can't buy less than one million of these machines at the time.

Still, if I had a 100 million $ hanging around asking to be used, I might just have bought and donated them to schools even the presumed wealthy paradise of Norway. This is a wonderful, fantastic idea, and should be available to ALL children.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

X-ellent idea! 100 million us$ is not much for this little country and considering the size of the oil reserves and already deposited income I believe we could buy laptops for most children (schools) in the world without really hurting. That would be a real gift to the development of a better world.

Torill said...

You are not negative Anne Guri, but the world needs more than charitable gifts of food from the rich to the poor.

Education is help to help yourself. It's much better to make the inhabitants of a country able to take care of themselves and their own, than to send them random gifts of food, clothes or medicine. I agree that food is important, but why should we just send food and keep the know-how needed to change their way of living for ourselves?