One Laptop Per Delusional MIT Douchebag
The hype surrounding the “One Laptop Per Child” project has been building for years now pretty much hiccup-free, unless you count the revelation that the $100 laptop actually costs $500 or whatever.
Leading the charge is Nicholas Negroponte, darling of reactionary nerds and Cory-Doctorow-style-dipshits everywhere, who’s best known for writing books about how cool the future is going to be once someone else does all the hard work of getting us there. It’s amusing to note that even reputedly merit-driven MIT is vulnerable to the wiles of seductive bullshit peddlers like Negroponte.
Finally Dan Lyons (AKA Fake Steve Jobs) writes the appropriate takedown. Moneyshot:
“Frankly I’m shocked to see these guys having problems. I mean, a brand new hardware design, a new screen technology, a customized Linux operating system, a one-off user interface, and the customers are the poorest nations in the world, and they’ll be paying with government money which means they have to get politicians to vote on orders, and they’ll have to place huge orders with no pilot programs, and the kids will have these things tossed in their laps and be expected to write code and do all their own maintenance, and the whole project will be run by woolly academics who have never even worked in a real company let alone run one. What could possibly go wrong?”
A similar line of thinking (“hey, let’s air-drop technology on people who lack basic services!”) is often seen among the Nerderati during disaster scenarios. I’ll never forget the BoingBoing half-wits who self-organized to set up wireless internet access in New Orleans after Katrina. Thank god those people in need of food, clean water, and shelter were able to just shop for it on Amazon.
Anyhow, it sounds like all these delays will mean that the children of the Third World will need to wait a while longer for their access to free porn.
