As for the idea, ehhhh. Obviously, companies have powerful incentives to reduce the price of manufacturing facilities, and yet they still cost millions of dollars.
Poor nations are not poor because the tools aren't cheap enough, but because of official corruption, or uncontrolled nationalization, or because the state can't maintain a monopoly on violence.
If they actually pull it off, it would be great, and might have some actual commercial applications, (like how the OLPC project resulted in the creation of the netbook concept, despite the OLPC itself being quite useless) but the stated use case just doesn't exist.
The kids in Paraguay don't seem to think the OLPC is useless; although obviously the OLPC project has failed to achieve anything like its original goals, it's still producing things people want.
See also:
http://www.molecularassembler.com/KSRM.htm http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/As for the idea, ehhhh. Obviously, companies have powerful incentives to reduce the price of manufacturing facilities, and yet they still cost millions of dollars.
Poor nations are not poor because the tools aren't cheap enough, but because of official corruption, or uncontrolled nationalization, or because the state can't maintain a monopoly on violence.
If they actually pull it off, it would be great, and might have some actual commercial applications, (like how the OLPC project resulted in the creation of the netbook concept, despite the OLPC itself being quite useless) but the stated use case just doesn't exist.