This fall more than 500 children in Thailand will be part of a pilot program for “quality testing and debugging” of the $100 laptop.  The One Laptop Per Child program, which is supplying the computers, is the brainchild of tech guru Nicholas Negroponte, who has spent the last several years developing and refining the technology.  The computers run on the free Linux operating system and use flash memory instead of a standard hard drive.  When access to the electrical power grid is unavailable, the computers can be powered by either a foot pump or a hand crank.