This is essentially 100% of the developing world kids to have gotten any laptops at all.

Sure mr troll under the bridge. Intel has no relations with OEMs like Asus whatsoever, and Intel also manufactures the Classmate all by themselves, not by any chance in the same Pegatron factories that make Asus Eee laptops. Asus Eee was a staged marketing stunt orchestrated by Intel for Asus to block OLPC sales, go look back.

You are welcome to get a XO development machine and show that Mint works great on it.

Apple can install Mac OSX on any OLPC XO laptop today and have always been able to, just to prove that they can make it run. OLPC laptops are 100% fully dual-bootable, just put any other compatible OS on the SD card and reboot. To this day, I don't believe Apple has provided any compatible version of OSX for these laptops. OSX is closed source, only Apple can come and provide a compatible "Light" version of their software to run on the machines. Apple prefers to keep their money at doing other things.

Archos officially allows you to root your Archos Android Tablet using a "Special Developer Edition" firmware. Thing is, for official root support on such compact embedded devices you have to loose the warranty. At least for now. For example, you could write code that constantly over-clocks the processor or abuses something else in there and that can harm the hardware, so manufacturer is not able to support that.

Total US Military Spending 2010: $685.1 billion That's about $2 Billion per day.

The relation is Governments and Money. It would absolutely be a military strategy to invest in education, every $1 spent on education could be worth 100x more towards bringing peace than every $1 spent on artillery or tanks.

It's useful to compare things, analyse money transactions for understanding the value of things. For the price of 1 day of the US war in Afghanistan, all the kids of the whole country of Afghanistan could get a laptop. Shouldn't the head of military strategists consider that it may be worth it, that giving all the children in the whole country this type of tool could calm down some of the suicide bombers, might convert some of the extremists? Most of the girls in Afghanistan don't go to school at all, because they are scared or just not allowed to, why not give them this tool so they can at least try to learn themselves at home? You can't say this is not about politics.

It's a US project made by the good people at the US MIT, without US initiative this project might not exist yet. Sure thing, I wish India, China, Europe, Saudi Arabia, all join together and make sure every child on this planet get a fair chance at education now. It's politics that decide the priorities and where to put the money, tax who and sponsor what. The idea is sure enough we need to build a few million more/better schools, and bring Internet to all. But, even though those things have to happen, better food, better health and security, we might as well give the children a school in a box which a Laptop has the potential to be.

2 billion kids are waiting. US spends billions dollars every day on useless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Why is it so unrealistic to have a vision where one actually puts money in educating the kids as soon as possible, before they grow old and miss their opportunity of getting inspiration to do big things in their future.

How much is Google spending on non-profit projects per year? Billions of dollars? Wouldn't it be good if the craze that goes on around Android and Chrome could be fully utilized by a global education project instead of these things happening separately? If OLPC can find a way to make it central to the whole Mobile Computing trend to also support full productivity, full educational purposes, real usefulness and not only Angry Birds. That could be very positive couldn't it?

That hardware is basically awesome, it's now just a question of software to make it fully Intel Atom netbook killer. It's nearly half the weight, potentially 50% of the price, runs 3x longer on a battery, may run even twice as much or more with a reflective Pixel Qi screen.

You won't find a sub-5Watt system (including the screen) running Intel Atom or AMD Fusion, so those cannot be compared. Why AMD or Intel don't go lower power, go ask them. the VIA Nano allows for a 4Watt system, which is a bit lower than AMD Geode.

Definitely they should add Android apps support somehow, I think the kids in Peru are going to enjoy Angry Birds.

The $100 has always been target that can only be reached once more than 6 million units are mass manufactured, that was always the original idea. Intel tactics though, it has been proven in official state letters, successfully blocked OLPC from reaching countries like Nigeria, China, India, etc. But even though they "only" sold 2 million laptops to children in some of the poorest places in the world, you can find plenty videos online http://olpc.tv/ , see how the kids and teachers are using those daily, it's a huge success. I mean comon, OLPC may have deeply changed the lives of 2 million families in more or less very poor third world countries. Sure enough, it'd be better they reached 2 billion kids by now, by they I mean OLPC or anyone else in the industry. It's all about lowering cost and lowering power consumption of laptops and also bringing internet everywhere.