Idiots Alert: $100 laptop

Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab
has been touting a $100 laptop all year
and everybody seems to lap it up
probably because he's from MIT

but MIT's Media Lab is a joke
whose outstanding talent is hype
and whose greatest success is Lego Mindstorms

and the product he's describing
will cost $500 minimum with today's technology

so his $100 boast is whitehot air
a pricepoint chosen not because it was realistic
but because it's barely imaginable

and the fantasy that such a price breakthru
could arrive first via the Media Lab
and be distributed first to the needy

is as believable as UFOs arriving any day now
to take us home to the mothership