One thing those netbooks didn't/don't do that OLPC aimed to do was mesh networking. Internet connectivity is still... spotty, at best, in a lot of countries -

One thing those netbooks didn't/don't do that OLPC aimed to do was mesh networking. Internet connectivity is still... spotty, at best, in a lot of countries - even in some of the so-called "developed" ones. I watched a video¹ today about the ongoing civil war in Myanmar, and while the video focuses on the rebels' use of 3D-printed firearms, there was a smaller point about how a lot of Rohingya villages ended up entirely caught off-guard during the most recent wave of genocidal purging because news would travel too slow from village to village; as the Junta forces would descend upon one village, there was no effective way for that village to warn its neighbors. First thing that popped into my head: "ain't this something OLPC and other mesh network attempts would've been able to address?" A lot of mesh networking experiments, including that of OLPC, seem to have failed - but some have shown some recent success. Maybe it's time to have another go at deploying mesh networks to the masses at scale, learning from those failures and successes? ---- ¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0oXupwf2D4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0oXupwf2D4