Misbehaving points out something I referred to last month - the $100 laptop is solving the wrong problem:

Marthe Dansokho from Cameroon says that this cheap computer is the result of an insular American-user mind set.

"African women who do most of the work in the countryside don't have time to sit with their children and research what crops they should be planting," she pointed out. "We know our land and wisdom is passed down through the generations. What is needed is clean water and real schools."

I think I had that thought:

This is a pie in the sky solution, IMHO. It's like deciding to hand out cheap cars, and only later noticing that there are no gas stations for the recipients to use.

The problems in large parts of Africa are much more basic than needing laptops - clean water being one of them. Access to medicines for diseases we can cure being another. Not to mention the whole infrastructure issue - of what use is a low power notebook that has no network to connect to? In war torn Africa, who the heck is going to build out a network? And how the heck are they going to pay for it?

I'm sorry, but there are so many things that the money behind this project could have been better spent on.