This has been MIT Media Lab leader Nicholas Negroponte’s baby for a couple of years, and it’s finally reached fruition. Witness the $100 laptop (via John Dvorak) that can be hand-cranked when electricity is unavailable:
The machine’s A-C adapter would double as a carrying strap, and a hand crank would power them when there’s no electricity. They’d be foldable into more positions than traditional notebook PCs, and carried like slim lunchboxes. For outdoor reading, their display would be able to shift from full color to glare-resistant black and white.
And, as you might suspect, the thing runs Linux, not Windows.
Of course, the crank only gets you 10 minutes of juice for one minute of cranking. The exercise the kids will get will offset their new-found computer-using sloth.
Negroponte hopes to get up to 15 million of these in production this year. Personally, I’d prefer to see that $1.5 billion spent on feed and housing poor people, but then I generally favour a bread-before-books approach. After all, you can’t eat a laptop.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
You need both “bread” and “books” – bread to keep people alive, and books to allow them to improve their lives beyond sustenance levels. How many billion are already spent on bread?
Aaron: I think you’re interpreting my statement a little too literally. But, to answer your question, not nearly enough money is spent on ‘bread’, or the means to make ‘bread’.
And as for books, I’m guessing Negroponte could get a lot more mileage out of his millions by just buying actual books, to achieve basic education and literacy.
Truth to tell I personally would like a $100 linux box with a hand crank for emergencies. I bet they sell lots in the first world.
One marketing technique I suggested was to sell these devices for $200, with the promise to send one for every laptop sold to the third world.