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Venezuela Purchases a Million Intel Classmates
An anonymous reader submits news of the million-laptop order from Venezuela of Intel's version of the kid-friendly laptop. The computers are produced in Portugal. "The machines, rebranded 'Magellan,' will also come with Linux pre-installed as opposed to Windows XP. This order alone is 50% bigger than the entire OLPC project has managed to sell worldwide."
Kids don't need teachers.
How we know is more important than what we know.
As a Portuguese concerned about the education of the young and concerned about the economy, I must that these Magellan computers (named after Ferdinand Magellan, a very famous portuguese maritime explorer) are nothing but a huge scam based on portuguese tax holders. We are talking about a 900 MHz refurbished Intel Classmate PC that is both ugly, heavy, and marketed as "built in Portugal", which is _not_! And the choice of operating systems is appalling! We can either stick with Window XP or Caixa Mágica, a portuguese GNU/Linux distribution that is horribly produced, horrible to use, horrible to maintain, but thrown around at every state sponsored GNU/Linux deployment. No wonder people dislike GNU/Linux after using Caixa Mágica...
But you know what. I am inclined to agree with Pinker but it's absolute statements like these that discredit him.
And the Bell Curve has not only been criticized for racism but also methodology.
I wouldn't consider him "popular science," since he uses hard science in the book and his research is about anything but a popular topic.
Stephen Pinker: Research
The entire point of his book is that intelligence and personality are heritable, in contrast to the "blank slate" theory which suggests human beings can be shaped or educated into having certain intelligence and personality traits.
Every book has been criticized for its methodology. Criticism alone debunks nothing. Do you have a valid counterargument, or are you just trying to insult away the problem?
Anti-Globalism, Traditionalism, and FreeBSD.
god forbid Venezuelan people actually get to eat.
Ever since his price controls went into effect, certain staple foods have become harder and harder to find. Milk is hit or miss, same with eggs and the like. Hugo is a weird case, he seems to be trying to do some good things, but unfortunately his actions are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature and economics, much in the same way that opposite end of the spectrum small government no-regulation types do.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.