A Laptop for Every Child!

What a fantastic idea! Provide a laptop computer with internet access for every schoolchild. This isn’t a dream. The plans are actually already in place to provide inexpensive laptops for each and every schoolchild.

But don’t get your kids all excited about this because it’s not happening here, it’s happening in Libya.

The non-profit One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has as it’s objective supplying an inexpensive laptop, target about $100, for EVERY CHILD! The laptops will only be available through government ministries and not directly. Libya joins Argentina, Brazil, Nigeria and Thailand as countries with preliminary purchase agreements with OLPC. Libya has also indicated that it would be willing to pay for the laptops for poorer African countries including Chad, Niger and Rwanda.

The actual laptops, Linux based, with a color display, 500 mhz processor, 128 MB of DSRAM, 500 MB of Flash Ram but no hard drive, are being developed in Taiwan.

Wait a minute, what about the telecommunications infrastructure you ask? Not to worry, the OLPC laptop will also include ad-hoc networking software developed at MIT so the units will network right out of the box and the group is looking at low cost backbone network access techniques. OLPC is headquartered in Cambridge Massachusetts.

You notice anything missing in this picture? This is something that makes some sense. So, who’s the Senator working on the bill to buy a laptop for every American schoolchild? No one? Why the hell not!

Too expensive for a large country you say? Bullfeathers!. There are approximately 80 million school children in the U.S. That would be a cost of approximately 8 billion dollars. Well ducky we’ve spent 30 times that much in Iraq already. Current estimates place the cost of the war at more than 250 billion dollars. For that kind of money we could have bought $3,000 laptops for every schoolchild and I defy you to find a laptop that expensive. A top of the line unit, retail, goes for about $2,500.

Alternatively, rather than splurging on our own kids, we could have bought $100 laptops for every child in North and South America and maybe looked as good as Libya.

You can find out more at One Laptop Per Child.