The XO laptops are apparently just a little bit excellent. Who wouldn’t want a “spillproof, rainproof, dustproof and drop-proof” tablet PC/laptop with a 6 hour battery life, 200dpi screen and truly zero configuration wireless mesh networking? Especially for $400, but that price is only available for a few weeks in November. After that, you’ll have to go to Nigeria and steal one from a child.

The issue of theft and resale is real and may yet cripple the project. Since the plan is to completely forego selling to individuals and get developing world governments to order the laptops in $100m batches, then give them out to kids, we’re talking about a giant free handout to, by definition, poor uneducated youths. The laptops are valuable and easily tradable, so might there not be a slight temptation for those living on the poverty line to cash in their free gift for something more obviously useful? Nicholas Negroponte has heard this objection, but I find his response unconvincing. You can’t stop people selling their laptops if they want to, you can’t LoJack the device with disabler hardware if it’s as open as OLPC claim, and the idea that they can “make this machine so distinctive that it is socially a stigma to be carrying one if you are not a child or a teacher” has been blown out of the water by the Give 1 Get 1 programme, not to mention rave reviews in the New York Times.

The vision of millions of aspiring schoolchildren geeking out to wireless Wikipedia is beautiful, and I really hope it works, but I think implementing it as a Big Government Scheme is a mistake, and such a mistake as to possibly be the undoing of the whole thing. The key premise of the project is to take advantage of economies of scale by centralizing and collectivising the production. This is what the USSR did with farming, and while large farms can be more efficient than small farms, it was a complete disaster because of the total abandonment of traditional economic incentives. They had frequent famines, and the whole Soviet Union was eventually done in by its own lack of economic nous. It turned out that markets were much better at lowering costs than 5-year plans.

I end with a quote from the NYT review:

The laptop is now called the XO, because if you turn the logo 90 degrees, it looks like a child.

Really?

I’ve just been alternately boiled alive (or is that roasted?) and frozen to death in the sauna cycle. They say it’s good for people in general, so I’m hoping it’s good for people with a cold in particular. Sniffle.

I hope to see Atonement tonight. It’s the first proper film I’ve seen in ages, having been stuck in the genre ghetto by watching too many comedies and horrors. It’d better be good or I’m abandoning middle-class media forever and going back to a yummy junk-film diet.

(Fingers crossed this works this time…)