On Sun, 23 Sep 2007 04:14:52 -0700, Lex Spoon <lex at lexspoon.org> wrote:

> Yes, but the root cause of starvation is a poverty of knowledge.  Food
> aid helps with immediate crises, but if they are to be prevented in
> the future, the populace needs to know what is going on.

Actually, I'm prety sure starvation these days is caused by bad politics  
and just plain evil. Not that knowledge doesn't help there, too.

> Further, even leaving aside the possibility of big changes in the
> local society, better information helps in more immediate ways.  If a
> person checks out wikipedia and learns about germs, their life will
> get much better.

I'm not particularly prepared to debate it (and it's not really  
appropriate here), as the closest I've come to starvation is a 4-day fast,  
undertaken as a sort of experiment.

My main point is that I'm quite positive the OLPC crowd has researched the  
topic better than those of us who are casually monitoring the process.