A program can be installed at any time and that won't kill other, existing programs.
Tell that to Noteheads, Inc. Don't get me wrong, their Igor 1.0 Light is an excellent product by all other accounts: a musical expert system, written from head to toe in Common Lisp, which is just ridiculously full-featured: at 27 megs of RAM wastage, it's a classical composer's best friend. I've never seen a better composition program. And it's free (as in beer).
However, its installer suffers from a chronic case of the Software Egocentrism Syndrome. For starters, it's non-modal: you can't switch to other programs while installing it. That's annoying enough.
Even worse, however, is the fact that, when you done, a non-modal "notice" window pops up.
There is that kind of protection. It's just not built into the system.
In Mac OS releases previous to 9, it was available in a separate but free package called (whatsitname? I completely forgot it). With Mac OS 9, it's automatically installed: the "Login" application runs right after system start-up.
You can set up for your daughter a "kiddie" account, with access to only one folder and a few selected applications, with different, bigger and simpler views for folders and all.
It's a pretty good system for what it's intended to be: simple, personal/small office workstation sharing. No more.
THANK YOU! The fact that this ridiculous, absurd and fallacious dichotomy between "macro-evolution" and "micro-evolution" has been so widely propagated (and, in fact, is accepted by pseudo-scientific creationists despite the huge amount of evidence against it, simply because it's a nice, cozy way to acknowledge the existence of the evolutionary process while still managing to shove a God of the Gaps into it) is a true tribute to the idiocy of today's "anything goes", "everything is true if you want it to be" postmodern society.
I, personally, have had enough of it. Nobody, I repeat nobody, gets to shove postmodern dogma down my throat.
Ahhh, I see the New Jersey mentality is at work again. "If it works (however marginally), why bother getting it right?"
No wonder so much software sucks. I wonder how long a civil engineer would stay out of jail if he went by "if it hasn't fallen down so far, why should we bother making sure that it won't?"
I like Schneier (note the two 'e's) as much as the next guy.
But what we're discussing here isn't just whether a system is secure: it's whether it's trusted, which has a very specific definition. That's the entire point. Is OpenBSD, by itself, secure? Very much so. Is it trusted? Nope.
I release a spec, let's call it "One2000". It consists of only one line, specifically "In order to conform to One 2000, a program must print out an endless string of ones." (I'd probably give the ASCII value for '1' too, just for the sake of completeness.) I register One2000 in all the necessary ways.
My friend J. Random Hacker writes a program, let's say in Perl: print '1' while 1;
I (trivially but formally) test JRH's program and conclude that it does, indeed, conform to the One2000 spec. I thus brand this program "One2000-compliant."
Should print '1' while 1; be considered a 'trusted system'?
My (richly illustrated) point is, it's not just about getting tested. There are specific formal procedures involved. It's not as simple as it's made out to be.
You've managed to miss the entire point of the discussion. As the original poster pointed out, this isn't about "enough eyes make all bugs shallow"; it isn't even really about bugs. It's not about "open == good && closed == bad", no matter how much faith the Slashdot crowd may have in this doctrine.
It's about OSS not being developed in a careful, thoroughly planned and controlled fashion. It's about the fact that right now, no OSS system out there can be satisfactorily considered "trusted", not even the high-and-mighty, "look ma I'm secure" OpenBSD.
I've pointed out elsewhere why a formal definition of the term "trusted" is important. Shortly, it's not enough to simply say "the general consensus is that it's secure, so let's just say it's trusted".
(And your absurd overgeneralisation to the effect that all expert reviews are corrupted doesn't help your case one bit. FYI, in the Real World (i.e. outside of Slashdot), ad hominem is frowned upon.)
Under that definition, Open Source cannot be a trusted system.
Untrue. It hasn't been done yet, but it's very possible. However, it wouldn't be a "typical" OSS project:
A contributor would be required to have at least some experience with formal techniques for building trusted systems.
It should use better, more advanced tools for distributed development than the vim/make/CVS combo by which most Unix hackers nowadays swear.
It shouldn't use C/C++. (Ever tried to do closed-world program analysis with C++?) Languages such as Eiffel, which provide better support for formal development techniques, should be used.
I would hold up OpenBSD as an example of a system that I consider trusted, yet was not developed under any formal spec
Not to make this seem like an attack, but your personal opinion regarding OpenBSD isn't really relevant to the rest of the world. Right now, having a software system be labeled as "trusted" means something: that the system's developers used the best techniques available to make sure that it could fit the regular definition of "trusted". If we abandon it in favour of "I think it's pretty secure, and so does the general consensus, so why not just call it trusted", the word loses its meaning and purpose entirely.
A young programmer once asked Stallman: "How can I do Rapid Application Development for Linux?" To which Stallman replied: "If you want to develop applications rapidly, I suggest looking into Scheme."
Of course, what the novice really meant was "how can I cook up pretty-looking programs with the bare minimum of knowledge and effort and call myself a Linux programmer?" In this (poorly paraphrased) story, Stallman illustrates what I consider to be a fundamental difference between the school of thought that says "get it done the quick and easy way" and the school of thought that says "get it right".
Whether this dichotomy is related to the Windows/Linux development dichotomy remains unanswered... just take a look at the source code for a typical "Open Source" Linux project. Ah well.
I'm sorry to burst your bubble people, but they are just discovering the basics of nanotech and there is no fucking way we will see intelegen nanobots any time soon.
That's not really true. First, the "basics of nanotech" have been well-known since Drexler's Nanobots, which, IIRC, is a 1992 book. 8 years is a long long time. I'd say that the worst possible case gives us around fifteen years before we have practical nanoassembly and therefore fully working nanotech.
That doesn't mean we'll have "intelligent" nanobots by then - if that's even possible: how can a single, if large, organic molecule be intelligent? The point of nanobots isn't that they're intelligent; it's that they're very small, there can be a shitload of them, they'll be very easy to build and very quick to replicate. It's biotech to the square.
And your proposed solution for nanotech might work within the scope of the FDA's power (i.e., the US of A)... but not all research in the world is conducted in the US of A, by a long shot. Even here in Brazil there are quite a few universities and research centers working on nanotech-related fields. If somebody figures it out before everyone else, and the technology ends up falling into the wrong hands, then it will be a damned serious problem... and, no matter how protectionist you guys get, I'd like to see the US Customs try to keep individual molecules from getting into your country...
In the 1940s, Zuse also designed "Plankakül", which is widely considered to have been the first algorithmic language. It has some of the features characteristic of today's high-level languages.
The paper The "Plankalkül" of Konrad Zuse: A Forerunner of Today's Programming Languages [Bauer and Wössner, Mathematisches Institut der Technischen Universität München] is available in HTML form at Eric Raymond's Retrocomputing Museum. It describes Plankakül in excruciating detail... it's a very fun read (if you're into ancient and bizarre programming languages, that is).
Uuuuuuuh... in case you haven't noticed it, this is an article from American Scientist. It's not intended for the "average Slashdot geek", whatever that is.
And frankly, it's nowhere as math-deep as it could have been; it's left me wanting more mathematical detail, and I'm a mere "computer scientist".
"The guy"'s prose is fine; he weaved the story rather well, reminding me more than once of James Burke's Connections column on SciAm. He also did a good job of explaining the mathematics; I think anyone with more than an elementary understanding of it (i.e. who knows what a fraction is) would have had a pretty easy time reading the article.
I would have hoped that "the average slashdot geek" (which is what you seem to consider yourself to be) would have a more firm grasp of basic math, especially considering that it's where all of "computer science" comes from. Maybe I'm just an optimist. Ah well.
After reading this article, I went to look things up at Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics (courtesy of the makers of the great but ridiculously overpriced Mathematica).
Anyway, here are some quotes from articles in mathworld related to the original article:
Stern-Brocot tree. "A special type of binary tree obtained by starting with the fractions 0/1 and 1/0 and iteratively inserting (m+m')/(n+n') between each two adjacent fractions m/n and m'/n'. The result can be arranged in tree form as illustrated above. The Farey sequence Fn defines a subtree of the Stern-Brocot tree obtained by pruning off unwanted branches (Vardi 1991, Graham et al. 1994)."
Gear curve. "A curve resembling a gear with teeth given by the parametric equations x = r cos t, y = r sin t, where r = a + 1/b tanh [b sin (n t)]."
Phi, the golden ratio. "A number often encountered when taking the ratios of distances in simple geometric figures such as the pentagram, decagon and dodecagon. It is denoted [phi], or sometimes [tau] (which is an abbreviation of the Greek ``tome,'' meaning ``to cut''). [phi] is also known as the divine proportion, golden mean, and golden section and is a Pisot-Vijayaraghavan constant. It has surprising connections with continued fractions and the Euclidean algorithm for computing the greatest common divisor of two integers."
(Note: the above quotes from mathworld fall under the definition of "fair use". Please don't sue me!)
Even if Joy were still a relevant figure in the computer industry nowadays, he still wouldn't be qualified to talk about "the dangers of nanotech" and what we should do about them. His ridiculous article (published on Wired, even!) made that painfully evident.
Richard Feynman once said something to the effect that a scientist is usually just as wrong on non-scientific matters as a non-scientist. The same applies here. The idea that we should mind Bill Joy's crazed rant on nanotech (as opposed to Joe Q. Public's crazed rant on nanotech) just because he's Bill Joy (as opposed to being Joe Q. Public) is a logical fallacy: a clear case of the argument from authority gone haywire.
You wouldn't perhaps know where an online copy of this paper might be found, would you?
(I did search Google. All I found was one of the authors' Web site - no copy there - and about a thousand references to the "lion in the Sahara" problem.)
I am entertaining the idea of making a little FORTH compiler that would be also some sort of OS.
Who isn't?:)
Seriously, you'll probably want to check out the Tunes project, which aims at a reflective computing system, integrating a language and OS. They focus more on applicative languages, though.
There's also the Retro project for a FORTH OS, by Tom Novelli. It's been thrice-rewritten, so he must have at least learned something from it!:)
And no, reading the Linux kernel source is not a particularly good idea, I'd say. It's implemented in that nasty traditional mix of assembly and C. It'll have you thinking in C, which will then give you trouble when you go program in FORTH. (I know I hate mixing up the two.) Better to check out some of the traditional OS textbooks and reference implementations... as well as whatever code there is in Retro right now...
It's not about stopping Microsoft (it even could be - even one more "murder" is one too much). It's about making them pay for the damage they've done. That's the whole point of a lawsuit, isn't it?
I personally am not a "Linux supporter", but I'm in shock nonetheless.
Tell me, what's your secret? How is it possible to fit so much stereotyping in just one single message?
Have you just gone through previous Slashdot discussions, picked up anything that any given "Linux supporter" ever said, and taken that as representative of the thoughts, desires and beliefs of the entire "Linux supporter" community? It sure seems like it.
You might as well finish off by claiming that all Windows users are MS-loving zombies, or that all Mac users are braindead graphic designers.
If this is the kind of stuff you post to Slashdot on a regular basis, then it's a tribute to the idiocy of the moderation system that you've managed to get the +1 score bonus.
In a surprisingly short period of time allmost everybody switched from horse to car.
... with a caveat. Let me take you for a ride.
We start at downtown Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (Next to the Municipal Theatre and the National Library.) It's about as urban as an urban area can get. Constant traffic jams, a shitload of cars and busses.
So we leave the downtown area; less than 20 kilometers away, we're already headed towards the suburbs of the Baixada Fluminense. This is an area which mixes industries (an oil refinery in Duque de Caxias, for instance) and residential and commercial areas for the lower and middle-lower classes, many of whom go daily to Rio de Janeiro to work. We still see mostly old cars and busses, but the sight of equine transportation isn't really unusual anymore.
A few dozen kilometers further, we're in the Rio-Teresópolis highway. This is already a rural area; streets (some asphalted, some not) connect the highway to the nearby villages. These are decent places to live, more or less - we're not talking about the "middle of nowhere"; it's less than 100 miles away from Rio de Janeiro, the second most important city in Brazil. Yet it's already more common to see people going around by horse than by car.
You see, it turns out that a lot of people are still using horses. I'm not saying it's a good thing; I'm pointing out that it's there, it's real... and it's not in any way less relevant just because it's in the Third World.
I don't own a car. I never have, and never wanted to. All my life, I've always taken the bus from one place to another (not to mention my trusty bike, which would be just fine if it weren't for the fact that bike-riding in the streets of Rio is practically suicidal). Sure, it's slow. Sure, it's mildly dangerous. Sure, it's a R$0.90 fare (and it's gone up 50% from R$0.60 in one year and a half, this when Brazil is practically in a deflation period).
But I prefer taking the bus than paying for an overpriced (yes, cars here are ridiculously expensive, for no good reason), dangerous (you are safer in a bus or in a plane than in a car), bulky car which I'll have to ride through Brazil's ridiculously hole-filled streets. (Import cars suffer most from this: everyone I know who owns one is constantly having to pay top R$ to get their car fixed.)
Brazilians are wholly and completely obsessed with cars. Maybe the whole world is. Me, I hate them. A future without public transportation isn't a future for me.
Unfortunately, I have to agree with you. And I say this as the Fascist Moderator of OSO's talkback forums.
More often than not, OSO publishes articles that are horribly biased and completely ignorant. I wish that it weren't so, and just yesterday I submitted a proposal to the OSO Editor, Mr Kelly McNeill, that included some suggestions on how to improve the editorial quality of OSO's content.
I really hope he gives it some thought; I think OSO could be a really great opinion site, and it breaks my heart to see how many people consider it to be "the Internet's trashcan" (an actual quote!).
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, my mistake.
A program can be installed at any time and that won't kill other, existing programs.
Tell that to Noteheads, Inc. Don't get me wrong, their Igor 1.0 Light is an excellent product by all other accounts: a musical expert system, written from head to toe in Common Lisp, which is just ridiculously full-featured: at 27 megs of RAM wastage, it's a classical composer's best friend. I've never seen a better composition program. And it's free (as in beer).
However, its installer suffers from a chronic case of the Software Egocentrism Syndrome. For starters, it's non-modal: you can't switch to other programs while installing it. That's annoying enough.
Even worse, however, is the fact that, when you done, a non-modal "notice" window pops up.
It says "your computer must be restarted".
It's only got one button: "Restart".
"But I was in the middle of..."
"Your computer must be restarted."
"But I was chatting with..."
"Your computer must be restarted."
"Lord! Why hath thou forsaken me?!?"
Ah well. Just my software installation pet peeve.
There is that kind of protection. It's just not built into the system.
In Mac OS releases previous to 9, it was available in a separate but free package called (whatsitname? I completely forgot it). With Mac OS 9, it's automatically installed: the "Login" application runs right after system start-up.
You can set up for your daughter a "kiddie" account, with access to only one folder and a few selected applications, with different, bigger and simpler views for folders and all.
It's a pretty good system for what it's intended to be: simple, personal/small office workstation sharing. No more.
THANK YOU! The fact that this ridiculous, absurd and fallacious dichotomy between "macro-evolution" and "micro-evolution" has been so widely propagated (and, in fact, is accepted by pseudo-scientific creationists despite the huge amount of evidence against it, simply because it's a nice, cozy way to acknowledge the existence of the evolutionary process while still managing to shove a God of the Gaps into it) is a true tribute to the idiocy of today's "anything goes", "everything is true if you want it to be" postmodern society.
I, personally, have had enough of it. Nobody, I repeat nobody, gets to shove postmodern dogma down my throat.
Ahhh, I see the New Jersey mentality is at work again. "If it works (however marginally), why bother getting it right?"
No wonder so much software sucks. I wonder how long a civil engineer would stay out of jail if he went by "if it hasn't fallen down so far, why should we bother making sure that it won't?"
I like Schneier (note the two 'e's) as much as the next guy.
But what we're discussing here isn't just whether a system is secure: it's whether it's trusted, which has a very specific definition. That's the entire point. Is OpenBSD, by itself, secure? Very much so. Is it trusted? Nope.
My (richly illustrated) point is, it's not just about getting tested. There are specific formal procedures involved. It's not as simple as it's made out to be.
You've managed to miss the entire point of the discussion. As the original poster pointed out, this isn't about "enough eyes make all bugs shallow"; it isn't even really about bugs. It's not about "open == good && closed == bad", no matter how much faith the Slashdot crowd may have in this doctrine.
It's about OSS not being developed in a careful, thoroughly planned and controlled fashion. It's about the fact that right now, no OSS system out there can be satisfactorily considered "trusted", not even the high-and-mighty, "look ma I'm secure" OpenBSD.
I've pointed out elsewhere why a formal definition of the term "trusted" is important. Shortly, it's not enough to simply say "the general consensus is that it's secure, so let's just say it's trusted".
(And your absurd overgeneralisation to the effect that all expert reviews are corrupted doesn't help your case one bit. FYI, in the Real World (i.e. outside of Slashdot), ad hominem is frowned upon.)
Untrue. It hasn't been done yet, but it's very possible. However, it wouldn't be a "typical" OSS project:
I would hold up OpenBSD as an example of a system that I consider trusted, yet was not developed under any formal spec
Not to make this seem like an attack, but your personal opinion regarding OpenBSD isn't really relevant to the rest of the world. Right now, having a software system be labeled as "trusted" means something: that the system's developers used the best techniques available to make sure that it could fit the regular definition of "trusted". If we abandon it in favour of "I think it's pretty secure, and so does the general consensus, so why not just call it trusted", the word loses its meaning and purpose entirely.
Put your hands in plain sight! Onanism is a SIN! Yes, a SIN against GHOD, I tell you!
:)
Seriously, that was the first thing that popped in to my head too. You beat me to it.
A young programmer once asked Stallman: "How can I do Rapid Application Development for Linux?" To which Stallman replied: "If you want to develop applications rapidly, I suggest looking into Scheme."
Of course, what the novice really meant was "how can I cook up pretty-looking programs with the bare minimum of knowledge and effort and call myself a Linux programmer?" In this (poorly paraphrased) story, Stallman illustrates what I consider to be a fundamental difference between the school of thought that says "get it done the quick and easy way" and the school of thought that says "get it right".
Whether this dichotomy is related to the Windows/Linux development dichotomy remains unanswered... just take a look at the source code for a typical "Open Source" Linux project. Ah well.
To bypass the "free registration required" BS on any NYT article, just replace the "www" in the URL by "partners": like this. Good readin'!
(No, it's not "Redundant". You may already know about this; some don't. It's useful nonetheless.)
I'm sorry to burst your bubble people, but they are just discovering the basics of nanotech and there is no fucking way we will see intelegen nanobots any time soon.
That's not really true. First, the "basics of nanotech" have been well-known since Drexler's Nanobots, which, IIRC, is a 1992 book. 8 years is a long long time. I'd say that the worst possible case gives us around fifteen years before we have practical nanoassembly and therefore fully working nanotech.
That doesn't mean we'll have "intelligent" nanobots by then - if that's even possible: how can a single, if large, organic molecule be intelligent? The point of nanobots isn't that they're intelligent; it's that they're very small, there can be a shitload of them, they'll be very easy to build and very quick to replicate. It's biotech to the square.
And your proposed solution for nanotech might work within the scope of the FDA's power (i.e., the US of A)... but not all research in the world is conducted in the US of A, by a long shot. Even here in Brazil there are quite a few universities and research centers working on nanotech-related fields. If somebody figures it out before everyone else, and the technology ends up falling into the wrong hands, then it will be a damned serious problem... and, no matter how protectionist you guys get, I'd like to see the US Customs try to keep individual molecules from getting into your country...
In the 1940s, Zuse also designed "Plankakül", which is widely considered to have been the first algorithmic language. It has some of the features characteristic of today's high-level languages.
The paper The "Plankalkül" of Konrad Zuse: A Forerunner of Today's Programming Languages [Bauer and Wössner, Mathematisches Institut der Technischen Universität München] is available in HTML form at Eric Raymond's Retrocomputing Museum. It describes Plankakül in excruciating detail... it's a very fun read (if you're into ancient and bizarre programming languages, that is).
Uuuuuuuh... in case you haven't noticed it, this is an article from American Scientist. It's not intended for the "average Slashdot geek", whatever that is.
And frankly, it's nowhere as math-deep as it could have been; it's left me wanting more mathematical detail, and I'm a mere "computer scientist".
"The guy"'s prose is fine; he weaved the story rather well, reminding me more than once of James Burke's Connections column on SciAm. He also did a good job of explaining the mathematics; I think anyone with more than an elementary understanding of it (i.e. who knows what a fraction is) would have had a pretty easy time reading the article.
I would have hoped that "the average slashdot geek" (which is what you seem to consider yourself to be) would have a more firm grasp of basic math, especially considering that it's where all of "computer science" comes from. Maybe I'm just an optimist. Ah well.
After reading this article, I went to look things up at Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics (courtesy of the makers of the great but ridiculously overpriced Mathematica).
Anyway, here are some quotes from articles in mathworld related to the original article:
Stern-Brocot tree. "A special type of binary tree obtained by starting with the fractions 0/1 and 1/0 and iteratively inserting
(m+m')/(n+n') between each two adjacent fractions m/n and m'/n'. The result can be arranged in tree form as illustrated above. The Farey sequence Fn defines a subtree of the Stern-Brocot tree obtained by pruning off unwanted branches (Vardi 1991, Graham et al. 1994)."
Gear curve. "A curve resembling a gear with teeth given by the parametric equations x = r cos t, y = r sin t, where r = a + 1/b tanh [b sin (n t)]."
Phi, the golden ratio. "A number often encountered when taking the ratios of distances in simple geometric figures such as the pentagram, decagon and dodecagon. It is denoted [phi], or sometimes [tau] (which is an abbreviation of the Greek ``tome,'' meaning ``to cut''). [phi] is also known as the divine proportion, golden mean, and golden section and is a Pisot-Vijayaraghavan constant. It has surprising connections with continued fractions and the Euclidean algorithm for computing the greatest common divisor of two integers."
(Note: the above quotes from mathworld fall under the definition of "fair use". Please don't sue me!)
Even if Joy were still a relevant figure in the computer industry nowadays, he still wouldn't be qualified to talk about "the dangers of nanotech" and what we should do about them. His ridiculous article (published on Wired, even!) made that painfully evident.
Richard Feynman once said something to the effect that a scientist is usually just as wrong on non-scientific matters as a non-scientist. The same applies here. The idea that we should mind Bill Joy's crazed rant on nanotech (as opposed to Joe Q. Public's crazed rant on nanotech) just because he's Bill Joy (as opposed to being Joe Q. Public) is a logical fallacy: a clear case of the argument from authority gone haywire.
Ah well.
You wouldn't perhaps know where an online copy of this paper might be found, would you?
(I did search Google. All I found was one of the authors' Web site - no copy there - and about a thousand references to the "lion in the Sahara" problem.)
I am entertaining the idea of making a little FORTH compiler that would be also some sort of OS.
:)
:)
Who isn't?
Seriously, you'll probably want to check out the Tunes project, which aims at a reflective computing system, integrating a language and OS. They focus more on applicative languages, though.
There's also the Retro project for a FORTH OS, by Tom Novelli. It's been thrice-rewritten, so he must have at least learned something from it!
And no, reading the Linux kernel source is not a particularly good idea, I'd say. It's implemented in that nasty traditional mix of assembly and C. It'll have you thinking in C, which will then give you trouble when you go program in FORTH. (I know I hate mixing up the two.) Better to check out some of the traditional OS textbooks and reference implementations... as well as whatever code there is in Retro right now...
It's not about stopping Microsoft (it even could be - even one more "murder" is one too much). It's about making them pay for the damage they've done. That's the whole point of a lawsuit, isn't it?
Seriously, some people think that MS _does_ need to be punished, while others think that free market forces will destroy it anyway.
That's not really contradictory; I myself hold both views.
Consider: "Why send the murderer to jail when he's going to die in a few years?"
Do you see my point?
I personally am not a "Linux supporter", but I'm in shock nonetheless.
Tell me, what's your secret? How is it possible to fit so much stereotyping in just one single message?
Have you just gone through previous Slashdot discussions, picked up anything that any given "Linux supporter" ever said, and taken that as representative of the thoughts, desires and beliefs of the entire "Linux supporter" community? It sure seems like it.
You might as well finish off by claiming that all Windows users are MS-loving zombies, or that all Mac users are braindead graphic designers.
If this is the kind of stuff you post to Slashdot on a regular basis, then it's a tribute to the idiocy of the moderation system that you've managed to get the +1 score bonus.
In a surprisingly short period of time allmost everybody switched from horse to car.
... with a caveat. Let me take you for a ride.
We start at downtown Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (Next to the Municipal Theatre and the National Library.) It's about as urban as an urban area can get. Constant traffic jams, a shitload of cars and busses.
So we leave the downtown area; less than 20 kilometers away, we're already headed towards the suburbs of the Baixada Fluminense. This is an area which mixes industries (an oil refinery in Duque de Caxias, for instance) and residential and commercial areas for the lower and middle-lower classes, many of whom go daily to Rio de Janeiro to work. We still see mostly old cars and busses, but the sight of equine transportation isn't really unusual anymore.
A few dozen kilometers further, we're in the Rio-Teresópolis highway. This is already a rural area; streets (some asphalted, some not) connect the highway to the nearby villages. These are decent places to live, more or less - we're not talking about the "middle of nowhere"; it's less than 100 miles away from Rio de Janeiro, the second most important city in Brazil. Yet it's already more common to see people going around by horse than by car.
You see, it turns out that a lot of people are still using horses. I'm not saying it's a good thing; I'm pointing out that it's there, it's real... and it's not in any way less relevant just because it's in the Third World.
I don't own a car. I never have, and never wanted to. All my life, I've always taken the bus from one place to another (not to mention my trusty bike, which would be just fine if it weren't for the fact that bike-riding in the streets of Rio is practically suicidal). Sure, it's slow. Sure, it's mildly dangerous. Sure, it's a R$0.90 fare (and it's gone up 50% from R$0.60 in one year and a half, this when Brazil is practically in a deflation period).
But I prefer taking the bus than paying for an overpriced (yes, cars here are ridiculously expensive, for no good reason), dangerous (you are safer in a bus or in a plane than in a car), bulky car which I'll have to ride through Brazil's ridiculously hole-filled streets. (Import cars suffer most from this: everyone I know who owns one is constantly having to pay top R$ to get their car fixed.)
Brazilians are wholly and completely obsessed with cars. Maybe the whole world is. Me, I hate them. A future without public transportation isn't a future for me.
This really sounds like an article for OSOpinion.
Unfortunately, I have to agree with you. And I say this as the Fascist Moderator of OSO's talkback forums.
More often than not, OSO publishes articles that are horribly biased and completely ignorant. I wish that it weren't so, and just yesterday I submitted a proposal to the OSO Editor, Mr Kelly McNeill, that included some suggestions on how to improve the editorial quality of OSO's content.
I really hope he gives it some thought; I think OSO could be a really great opinion site, and it breaks my heart to see how many people consider it to be "the Internet's trashcan" (an actual quote!).