Big idea, small price
I’d seen mention of the $100 laptop project but never thought much past the lowered economic barrier part; reading this Wired interview with Negroponte, it’s much more interesting than that.
From this BB post, I found this Clive Thompson entry; the pencil and the mathland analogies are important ones.
The open-source aspect is very interesting too: OSS is already a pretty low-barrier world, what happens when you remove the hardware part? Not only will OSS be used (assuming this takes off) by millions of kids, any of them with any technical inclination will be carrying around their own OSS “mathland” with them. Among other things, Negroponte suggests this will push OSS desktop mainstream.
(via boingboing)