Family computing for a cause

It’s a new twist on buy one, get one free. You buy a laptop for a child in a developing country and your child gets one free. The project is called “Give 1 Get 1,” and with it, “Americans and Canadians can buy two laptops for $399,” the New York Times reports. The donated computer is a tax-deductible charitable contribution. Long in development, the One Laptop per Child campaign is “an ambitious project to bring computing to the developing world’s children,” according to the Times. And there have been some successes in getting laptops to their intended owners – e.g., Peru “will buy and distribute 250,000 of the laptops over the next year — many of them allocated for remote rural areas,” and the Italian government “has agreed to purchase 50,000 laptops for distribution in Ethiopia.”