XO laptop

The much publicised (and much poked-fun-at) project one-laptop-per-child project finally reaches it's resolution on November 12th when the XO laptop goes on sale in the US for $399. At this price the XO is not cheap considering that other people are starting to see laptops as free giveaways. The price is largely explained by the fact that your money actually buys two machines - one for yourself and one for an unknown child in the third-world. Neverless, it is a truly freaky machine and doubtless of interest to tech-geeks and collectors of white-elephants everywhere.

Kitting out children in developing countries with a laptop each is a nice idea, but it may not be the most pressing problem they face. It is interesting to consider whether Maslow would have been forced to find room for 'Wi-Fi' access in his hierarchy of needs today. Still, young male students Nigeria have proved that there are some human constants when they were found using their XO's to surf for porn (don't worry reader, the kind folks at XO have now installed prudish blocking filters to prevent such 'mis-use').