You're being kind of narrow minded here... What those kids need is not only food and medication, but also an education that will allow them to help themselves and their countries later in life; that is, to break the vicious circle of poverty. That's the whole point of the program. And it's not like they're taking money from the poor, uneducated people in the US to make those laptops; what they're doing is offer it to the governments of those countries at a price they can afford, and at no loss. They are able to offer them at just $100 because they're made cheaply, without any bells and whistles, and in really big quantities.
About the idiotic comments of Bill Gates: he is clearly showing that he doesn't know sh*t about designing a product with the user in mind, instead of pulling it out of his ass and let the user struggle with it, as he has been doing his whole life. He laughs about the crank, but completely ignores the fact that the kids who will be using the thing live in places with no electricity! Perharps he wants to have them use metanol instead? . IIRC, in places like Africa they have crank-powered radios, and they work just fine. It's not like you have to crank it continuously to have it work, like Bill is trying to imply; instead, you crank it every hour or so (probably more for the laptops; but if you ask me, that's better than having to plug it after an hour of use, like it happens with many laptops nowadays). He also says they should offer broadband connection... Maybe he isn't aware that there are whole countries in Africa that have a 1 mb/s connection? (that's 1 mb/s for the WHOLE country. And it's all for the government). Instead, what they did in the MIT is give the laptops an easy to set up MANET, something they can actually use (I bet Bill would just toss in an AOL coaster ). He said a lot about the computer being "shared", but AFAIK these laptops are personal (I remember Negroponte clearly stating that it should be one per kid, to give them a sense of ownership). According to gates, the thing is useless without a big ass HD... but what is it for? Those kids are just gonna be doing homework with it, and text and images aren't THAT heavy... maybe he doesn't recall that not so long ago, hard drives weren't bigger than today's pendrives? And finally, he also mocked the screen... too small to be useful, he said. Funny, because it looks bigger than the one on his Origami thing... and the resolution is the same that I used 10 years ago; and as far as I remember, I could read the text in my screen just fine. What Bill never addresses is the fact that all his "improvements" to the laptop would make it so expensive, that the whole purpose of it would be defeated... No poor kid could ever have one.
