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UN and MIT team up to provide $100 laptops

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Whether it's pharmaceutical companies in Africa (The Constant Gardener) or oil companies in the Middle East (Syriana), Hollywood is attacking big business on the silver screen for crimes perpetrated overseas. At least the computer industry probably won't be the next object of Tinseltown's derision (and nobody bothered to see Antitrust, anyway). At this week's World Economic Forum, the UN agreed to team up with One Laptop per Child — a nonprofit established by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab chairman Nicholas Negroponte — to provide $100 laptops to kids living in the world's least developed nations. Developed at MIT, the lime-green computers are roughly the size of a textbook, can operate on wireless networks, and, with the help of a hand crank, will work in areas without a reliable electrical supply. The goal is to pay for the project through government and charitable donations. With this gesture of international goodwill, the computer industry, unlike their corporate brethren, may be able to keep its name off Hollywood's hit list.

 
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