For a $100 - that's US, and it looks like they won’t actually hit that price point until 2008, at the earliest - I want one. I might actually finish work assignments on the plane before running out of power.

The project sounds like pure make-believe but with the likes of Google, AMD, News Corp, and Red Hat in for a penny you can be fairly sure it's serious business. In fact, the UN has approved of the scheme and a bunch of countries like Brazil and China are apparently looking into getting into it as well. Why buy books when there’s a whole web of texts out there?

Back to Thailand, Thaksin says the first round of computers – about 30 to start, with another 500 a month later - will go to the poorer children in the rural areas of the country.

Beyond long-term savings, this has another huge effect. It creates a whole generation of people who are irrevocably children of the digital age. Sure the brutally poor kids are still disadvantaged, but this scheme gives them access to any number of flash games ... er ... I mean, a huge world of information and high-tech skills. Besides eye-strain there's nothing stopping a project like this leading to people in the most primitive places teaching themselves programming at night for example (of course you'd have to download all of the texts at school, but hey).

While this might not be a story about gaming, it is a massive landmark for digital culture. Imagine a generation that never learns to write with a pencil and lined paper. Which only knows Hangman as a flash game. Sure, there are so many obstacles that any reasonable person has to doubt that millions of kids will actually end up with laptops (even if they are as cheap as $100) in the near future. But the fact a country's PM can even make this kind of plan sound vaguely feasible just blows me away.

What a world we live in. Viva la digital revolution!