Can't use them for this story anymore, now that you posted. Yes, I know, I know, *whoosh!*

I'm dying for a mod point here. I don't care if you're an AC. That's FUNNY!

Too bad. I misremembered this as being a "The Oatmeal" comic, but still, you need to take a look at this.

I live in a tribal village in Peru, and the kids here have OLPC laptops. The trouble is bigger than teachers who have not been educated to make good use of the laptops (although that is an issue too). There isn't electricity here, much less internet (except my personal VSAT). While a computer loaded with educational resources is useful without an internet connection, it is a nice shiny green and white brick without power. For all of the hoopla about hand-crank or foot pedal chargers, I haven't seen one. When my solar panels are pulling in enough power, I'll charge one up for a kid or even let them on the internet, but my resources are limited in these areas too. So...it will be hard to REALLY evaluate the effectiveness of a machine like the OLPC until we have solved these basic infrastructure issues.

I live in a rural village in Peru. There IS money here, even though everyone here is a subsistence farmer. There are some government programs that wind up putting a very small bit of money in people's pockets. Sometimes people will leave the village for a few months to work a menial job in town somewhere. And sometimes, people decide to grow a small amount of a cash crop (like coffee or cacao), which they can then carry two days to sell for $1-$2 per kilo. Once money is in the village, it gets passed around for work or in trade for produce or game.

Sounds good to me. I do a city/village back and forth too. Right now, I'm in the city on my "fast" 600/256 kbps connection, but when I go back to the village next week, I'll be on a 256/128 kbps, ridiculously expensive VSAT system. Wireless isn't an option, between the mountains and the 200 mi to a city with non-dial-up internet. Beats the snot out of the 3x weekly shortwave radio check-in we did before. There's dark fiber run to the city, and it was set to turn on a few weeks ago. We're in Peru, so that means that we're likely still a few weeks off, but we ARE in any day now mode. When that gets turned on, I'll get a BLAZING FAST 3mbps for about double the $50/month I pay now. At least fruit is cheap here.

If your satellite provider is "doing it right" (and most of them do), they'll proxy everything on its way up from a datacenter somewhere with a fast pipe and send it all on up to your remote router in a chunk, and your request ends at the router in the next room. If they didn't do this, the latency would be a much bigger issue.

Much less annoying than having to route all of your communications through a short-wave radio. I'll take VOIP (or even video chat) over a terrible VSAT connection any day. In fact, I do. It's all a matter of perspective.

Yup, most days, via a bi-directional VSAT connection. It's slow, but usable. I browse Slashdot while it loads up (30-60 seconds). Once it's loaded, it's pretty snappy. Honestly, though, I figured the fractional (split up to 10 ways) 256kbps that I pay over $300 for was more to blame than the latency, especially with Chrome's and Firefox's DNS caching. (I wish I had the VSAT pricing and competition available in the USA!! Alas, VSAT options in South America are pretty limited. I'll take a look at this service too, but I expect it won't be available here.)

I have this sneaking suspicion that no matter how may of them we give iPads to, we won't be seeing them produce Shakespeare's complete works anytime soon.

Actually, I've lived for a number of months in the last few years without internet access. The closest thing I had was a 3x/week short-wave radio check in for safety/big news. (I live the bulk of my time in a small, totally off-grid village in the Amazon.) My conclusion: VSAT. My new internet connection is ridiculously expensive, and worth every penny.

Yup, your gender choices are "Male", "Female", and "Other". That about covers everything...

I totally agree. My wife and I both graduated with BA's from Christian colleges. She had the typical college finance experience, with the school squeezing every penny that they could out of her, and then sending letters to her (probably for the rest of her life) asking for donations. She liked the school otherwise, but that (although typical) was/is irksome.

I, on the other hand, went to Moody Bible Institute. It is a college that aims to prepare people to do full-time Christian ministry. Since most of these graduates wind up in fields that don't have great earning potential, they don't charge tuition. I'll repeat that: they don't charge tuition. It's not an easy school to get in to, (it's certainly not for everyone) and it is by no means perfect, but it was the right fit for me. (I'm a missionary, but I'm up late tonight doing some open source coding and getting distracted by Slashdot.) Anyway, Moody avoids charging tuition by having a profitable publishing house, as well as a radio station and broadcast media company. All of the profits that they turn from these (as well as some hefty donations) are what keep the financial wheels turning at the school. When I graduated in 2005, they estimated that for my graduating class, the waived tuition amounted to a $78,000 scholarship per graduating student.

I receive letters occasionally from Moody asking for donations, and these are MUCH more easy for me to stomach. I don't have much in the way of spare money at the moment, but if/when I have the means, supporting Moody is something I'd like to do. I appreciate my education, and the fact that I could get through it without taking out ANY student loans, and I'd love to help present that opportunity to others if at all possible.

Anyway, I realize that I'm on a tangent, but I think that Moody Bible Institute is as close to a true non-profit as I've seen any university be.

You would need to provide a shipping address to get a tax amount, but it wouldn't be that hard to code. You can get a database of tax rates by zip code pretty trivially. I think (when I programmed for a brick-and-mortar that delivered all over the state of CA) that we paid $100 annually for a CSV of the whole state's data, and if my memory serves me correctly, a national database was $500. It was updated from time to time, when tax rates changed, but it was a matter of dumping the CSV into a MySQL database a few times a year. I don't think that Amazon could legally set a flat "tax rate" and charge that for purchases, but charging by delivery zip would not be that hard.