It's amazing the amount of people who immediately cry hoax. Someone raised a good point about taking money from locals and bringing it to Europe/America/China, but clearly this isn't breaking the law of physics.
The original OLPC attempted to ship a pull-cord generator. Trevor Bayliss, of Freeplay radio fame, proposed a generator based on hoisting a weight on a branch of a tree. The principle is sound.
As for taking money from locals, I would be surprised if kerosene was produced locally... and even if it was, this is a one-time expense, versus an ongoing outlay.
I worked at OLPC. We didn't ship any kinetic charging systems as the most reliable ones had a mean time to failure on the order of ~three full charges. The scheme was cute and captured the imagination of people in the developed west but is fundamentally unsound due to the cost of high precision, reliable manual chargers and their miniscule power output. In addition to yielding only several full charges before the $50 charging unit failed, each charge would require tens of thousands of revolutions of a hand crank. As wonderful as the laptop was I think it would be a very strange thing for a child to do when they could easily play with something more immediate.
In practice most of the laptops are charged like other laptops--- from national power grids. Those that aren't are charged from diesel generators and solar power.
It's gratifying to see how much more substantive and less dismissive this thread is than that one from 2012. Partly it may be that the project itself has developed, but I'd like to think that HN threads have improved too.
