$100 Laptops Being Created For Developing Countries

The academic hive mind at MIT has put together a special, bare, bare bones laptop capable of being powered by a hand crank to propagate through schools in third-world countries (special note: Massachusetts is considering a purchase as well - something telling about America's stance on its youth's education funding). The machines, running on a 500 mhz processor with 1 gigabyte of flash memory (in lieu of a hard drive - flash memory has no moving parts, which makes it harder to destroy), will use linux rather than Windows, as it's free to procure. But not only will these things be cheap and powered by humans when there's no outlets in a 1,000 mile radius, they're also going to be able to fold more dramatically than traditional laptops, down to the size of kids' lunch boxes.

Hey, you might not be able to get your game on, but at the very least it means poor kids will get a chance to interact with technology that wasn't ever available to them.