More on the XO

In response to a friend, I wrote: The XO wouldn't be my preferred way to donate to improve education (that would be FAVL). There is a high risk that an enormous amount of energy has been put into this effort, and then large sums of public money spent, and that three years from now there will be dusty warehouses full of these machines sitting around. Ask yourself: would it be better to buy one laptop or 10 Leapfrogs.... The concept of the whole project is: if we do it big enough it will change the world. But like many "big ideas" conceived in university settings, it is vulnerable to the critique that, "big ideas don't succeed in the large because they were never tested in the small".