People of the Book

Since I was a little leapling, it has been one of the ikkarim of our faith that 'Jews are smart', or more chauvinistically, 'Jews are smarter'. Well, we may become the smartest anachronism around if we continue in the direction we're going.

Nicholas Negroponte of MIT (brother of the ambassador to Iraq) is bent on producing a $100 laptop to be distributed to governments world wide, including a wireless connection, for use by children (except our children, of course).
He's showing working samples today, at the international Internet meeting in Tunisia.

In Mr. Negroponte's words:

"One laptop per child: Children are your most precious resource, and they can do a lot of self-learning and peer-to-peer teaching. Bingo. End of story."

Fortune Magazine: "He's seeking orders in lots of a million. So far, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva has agreed to buy a million, Negroponte says, and Chile, Argentina and Thailand are lining up. Negroponte hopes to start production next year, ramping up to tens of millions in 2007."

You saw right. A million for Brazil. They'll have computers in the Amazon rain forest, and we'll be the indigenous natives.