No, I think your dad said it best when he said "Son, are you done with the computer? I'm going to upgrade it to a Pentium II so we can play some Commander Keen in hi-def. Also, have you seen my abacus.........I need to calculate how much these sweet pair of thick-rimmed tinted glasses are going to cost me.

Would you call a cellphone an invention?

Hell it's just the fusion of cellular communication electronics and a phone. Nah, your right, this can't be an invention either.

But surely the phone was an invention right?

That magic phone that instantly transmits your voice to someone else. What a gas that phone is. It's not like it relies on speakers, or microphones, or some sort of input device, or materials and material processes. No, it must not be an invention then since it's just a mashup of other inventions.

But wait, is the keypad on a phone an invention? I mean humans have been pressing shit with their fingers for millions of years. Hell that's not an invention either since someone's already done it in some other fashion.

So let's see.......according to your stringent requirements, the only things you could maybe argue as inventions are subatomic particles, but even those may have shit inside of them.

Damn logic.

People can bitch and moan about this project all they want (and I have a feeling most do because they're envious that it wasn't their idea), but it really will make a difference. The arguments about curriculums supporting the OLPC is largely irrelevant. Knowledge and power is in numbers. And that's what the networking possibilities of the OLPC provides: numbers. Think about how much of your knowledge comes from stuff you find out about through the internet from other people or from reading books. Hell, without the massive joint efforts going on through knowledge sharing over the net, yall wouldn't have modded Xbox's to cheat people with, yall wouldn't have the technology that makes this site and many others available, and yall wouldn't have this story to bitch over. So what if the OLPC's aren't used to give every kid the broadest education possible. That's a flawed system anyway. Broad educations produce politicians....because they suck at any one thing other than bullshitting. Say little Johnny Nigeria comes across an article about architecture at the age of 10. Fifteen years later he wows the world with a radically different approach to construction engineering with a home design that's a quarter of the cost and 4 times as reliable as current homes. His design provides affordable housing for 25% of the poverty class. That's millions of people he just provided shelter to, and if even one of those people is as smart and ambitious as he was, then the whole OLPC project was worth it. Cell phone screens are too small to do anything worthwhile. Otherwise Dell, Microsoft, Apple, Acer, etc. would be out of business. How bout you nay-sayers grow up, realize that you weren't smart or ambitious enough to come up with the idea, and go back to your Bitch and Moan forums.

Great, so now you can be strangled to death and have you ipod stolen, although I guess that IS better than having to endure shelling out another couple of c-notes for a new one.