Libya Purchases 1.2 mil Wind-up Laptops

An anonymous reader writes "The government of Libya is reported to have agreed to provide its 1.2m school children with a cheap, durable laptop computer by June 2008. The laptops offer internet access and are powered by a wind-up crank. They cost $100 and manufacturing begins next year, says One Laptop per Child. The non-profit association's chairman, Nicholas Negroponte, said the deal was reached on Tuesday in Libya. Professor Negroponte told the New York Times in an email that the project mirrored Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's political agenda of creating a more open Libya and he also expressed interest in purchasing the computers for poorer African neighbors."

Comments

Let's see how well this goes

[belal1]

let's see how well this actually goes. personally, i doubt the children will actually be using the laptops. instead i am very certain the parents will either sell it or the kids will get robbed by some local militia that always seems to pop up in every african country. eitherway, the kids won't have the laptops as projected and a black market is going to spawn up.

what i don't understand is, many places in libya don't even have electricity so how will the servers that each school is supposedly going to house, be powered? don't tell me someone will stand by 24-7 foot peddling for some juice...

Re:Libya: highest std of living in Africa

[GCsoftware]

You're an idiot.

Re:Terrorists!

[suntac]

To make sure that those kids will not become cyber terrorists and start learning all the good stuff from the beginning the US government has made sure that all those laptops will be shipped with Windows as the standard OS.

And thanks to some DRM chips you can only run Windows on them ;-) Well I jus made this up for fun but in fact it could very well be that it is running windows. Anyone knows what those machines are running?