You have edited an excellent Mathematics book that has gone out of print. In fact, it has been over 3 decades since you showed any interested in this excellent work. It seems there is no profit to be made out of this fine work.
Since you have demonstrated no interest in the intellectual heritage of mankind, instead of simply letting that fine work rot away in some library - or worse - sent to be recycled by the librarian (who thinks the book is too old to be of any interest), I have decided that I will keep that work alive, by scanning the book and releasing it into the Internet.
I feel you have no claims to copyright or any other such irrational arguments, since you yourself have done nothing to keep that outstanding intellectual achievement alive.
Sincerely yours,
Anonymous, King of the Internet
Re:I believe you mean freedom # -1
on
A Year of GPLv3
·
· Score: 1
The truth is that you can distribute GPL 3 code on any hardware you want, even hardware that refuses to run unsigned binaries, and including the fucking TiVo!
What kind of argument is that? Of course "you can do what you want". You're missing a whole lot of context here. Hello.
BTW, is it my impression or the number of project that have business-friendly licenses (i.e., can be incorporated in commercial products) has increased?
For instance, Google, etc.
ANyways, who the fuck wants to contribute to a project where the main developer can take your code, say "thanks very much, a-hole" and dual-license the thing while you make no money?
That's the real GPL loophole - it allows someone to get rich while you get none. It's a 0/+ interaction. The BSD license is a +/+ interaction (same rules apply to everyone, and everyone benefits).
Re:GPLv2 and GPLv3 have the same spirit
on
A Year of GPLv3
·
· Score: 1, Troll
I'd *really* like to see all you GPL addicts try to run a small firm selling embedded software/instrumentation/whatever that's GPLed - and having to give all your code to the competition.
Oh, wait, you don't want yo do that. You only want the service model where you work for someone else. You dream of being the salary men (web devs notwithstanding - not all software is a web app).
The GPL model is utterly useless in areas where hardware and software go together.
You are clueless. You no think. Get off the intertubes.
Corporation-friendly BSD vs. Communistic GPL: as someone else already said all the successful free software commercial products I remember are GPL.
You just forgot to mention that they either have licenses (per-seat, for example), are hardware manufacturers (ergo, the software is just a commodity), or dual-license (and therefore, are fucking hypocrites/wiseguys).
It's time to ask: What can science learn from Google?
This Wired editor guy is clueless.
People in the bioinformatics and computational biology have been saying these things now for well over a decade (at least). It's not about Google. It's not about Craig Venter. What a fucking shame for Wired to have such a pop-science fanboy for editor.
How mainstream and behind the curve Slashdot and Wired have become...
Some people prefer IntelliJ (Java), for example. In the case of Lisp, Java, Smalltalk, Forth and version control there seems to be a tools market.
If you have a vendor that delivers a superior product, why not pay? Isn't that, in the end, like paying for "support" in the FLOSS world? I think so. In fact, vendors will sell you support packages.
I believe there's a sweet spot in there between price and functionality unrivaled by open source tools. Some developers have been able to find it (IntelliJ, for example), others haven't. As with any business, there's a lot of marketing to it. I think UNA's strategy is smart: let the users try the free version and if they like it, and they're not cheapskates, they might upgrade to the collaborative version.
Don't forget Polyspace, which I personally have never used - but I would love to. Polyspace is a Standard ML (a higher-order functional programming language) success story, because it relies heavily on the SML MLton compiler. Another thing that makes it a success story is the fact the Mathworks (makers of Matlab) bought it.
The C/C++ version does MISRA-C (the C used in the automotive industry) too.
apt-get is not perfect. In fact, you may call "a hack." I don't think there's any real "theory" behind it. apt-get may even remove a user's kernel package, as one of the 600 traces in this study reveals:
where they mention "Theorem 1 (Package installability is an NP-complete problem). Checking whether a single package P can be installed, given a repository R, is NP-complete." (result is to be published elsewhere, though).
Unfortunately, Bruce, that does not the match reality of how these laptops are being used.
I don't see teachers in sufficient numbers being prepared to take advantage of open source. In Brazil (where I live), I see teachers that can barely teach their subject with a blackboard and white chalk.
What I see is cool and nice that kids have it, but it is miles away form Seymour Papert's dream. Or Alan Kay's dream.
When I was in 5th grade, I was taught Logo. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. These kids have Squeak. Squeak has the potential to blow your mind, because Squeak is multimedia-ready (and cool projects like Scratch have been developed on top of it).
But it seems that it ammounts to having a cool little laptop that can network.
There's nothing intrinsic to it that demands open source OS. Unfortunately, because ideally one would want to be able to go very, very deep. The project seems to fall short in that respect.
What are these kids learning that will teach them that it is the human that makes the computer?
That, to me, is the true "technological transfer."
So, the way the project has been led has been self-defeating, IMHO.
The last point I would like to make is that the GPL license does not, and will not, empower people in India, Brazil, or any other developing nation. This was a big mistake. Only a liberal license like the BSD license can empower people, permiting them to compete in a hostile commercial environment, contributing to a common source but not naively exposing one self to bigger corporations that would crush their businesses (unless they want to play the hypocritical "dual-licensing" - an euphemism to proprietary licensing).
My country has a problem that I perceive as a big issue: although, in theory, freedom of expression is guaranteed by law, in practice, you will get your ass seriously sued if you touch on some flaming issue (which can be anything the person on the other end of the screen thinks).
Journalists that work for big media outlets don't have this problem so much here in Brazil because they have teams of lawyers to fight the legal battles. But any blogger can get in serious trouble. Having to sell your furniture because of debt due to legal bills sucks.
Just this week I read about one such "intimidation attempt" (as I like to call it). The journalist, wisely, had hosted hist site on a US provider. According to him, the offended party could do nothing to him (meaning, couldn't take the content off line).
What can Freenet do for those cases? Do you access web pages, are there forums, or do you just download/upload stuff/files? And can content be hosted on Freenet but be seen by non-Freenet users (which I think would be the ideal thing for bloggers and journalists and other whistle-blowers)?
This is miles away from what Alan Kay is thinking, IMHO. This use of computers in the classroom is pretty much closer to what Bill Gates has written about. In my mind, this falls short and aims at a much lower target.
If that is the purported revolution in education than the deployment of open-source is self-defeating, because there's nothing that could not be done by Wintel machines.
The problem is much, much deeper than "52 mil" KDE users. It concerns the whole educational system. And it the problems are the same in the public schools of the US or Brazil. Or probably anywhere.
* Higher social-economic indicators than the North/North-eastern region.
I agree that modern education is not antithetical to other basic needs. I just don't think the Brazilian government has done its homework in what concerns teacher education. Teachers in the public schools earn very little and perform very badly.
I don't see them prepared to take advantage of an open source software platform. Of course, it will help to research and plug those minds to the internet and that alone is fantastic.
But I don't really think that should be the goal of computer use in public schools of Brazil or Tanzania (BTW, these two countries have huge differences in their parameters of health and income).
But then you have to ask what it means to be "computer literate." For one thing, if it means using Word and Excel- i.e. prepare them for today's menial jobs - than this project falls short (obviously). OTOH, if you understand that being computer literate is something along the lines of what Seymour Papert and Alan Kay thought it was, than I think this will fail miserably. IMHO, at the very least the student needs to understand the basic fact that the software in a computer is made by people and it doesn't come magically out of a town of Redmond, somewhere in the US of A.
Linux is already sold pre-installed on cheap hardware in Brazil. They sit right next to Vista boxen, with a pathetic resource-hungry KDE desktop, full of little click-on menus (mail, browser). Here's a photo: http://www.link.estadao.com.br/index.cfm?id_conteudo=12583
The first thing users do is remove Linux and install a pirate XP.
The type of user who buys this is someone who needs a computer but doesn't want to pay the more expensive MS product. He knows shit about Linux and would like to install MS Office (pirate) on it. His 10 year-old is all excited, thinking he now is gonna be able to play awsome video games and outcool the kids in the hood that have PS2. Heh. The cruely of it all.
There's absolutely nothing securing more future Microsoft mindshare than the Linux boxen being sold in Brazil.
No, Apples and Windows. Totally different things. One is not edible, does not taste nice and will leave your mouth full of cuts and all bloody if you try to digest it.
True. However, since Mac OS X is UNIX (certified) and since FreeBSD is part of Mac OS userland, my FreeBSD is more UNIX than their Linux.:-) Ok, fanboys, don't get all fussy now.
Yes, and you can also freely contribute for the betterment of MySQL sending them patches which they will gleefully include in their next stable release, just as soon as you fill those forms saying you give up on your copyrights, so that they can package your work and sell it for big bucks.
Yes, GPL software is great for (someone else's) business.
If Brazil's free software government initiative was serious, you would have a gazillion Brazilian C++ hackers toiling away at OpenOffice, all under a federal payroll.
Some will say "but what has government to do with funding software development?" Of course, these hypocrites will then go and praise the Brazilian government for their support of open source software.
Now, you talk to anybody in those Brazilian IT agencies and guys will tell you that they "used to program in Cobol" (or a funny Assembler flavor, or something funky on a bygone mainframe). Or: they're using Microsoft (in all honesty: there's Java, too). Because of Excel and Word, the all pervasive Microsoft killer apps.
Now, I absolutely loathe the parasitic brain-dead political clique that infected the Brazilian free software "scene". This is the second term of this leftist government, composed of pathological liars (some of which, BTW, are under investigation and are looking at some jail time) that like to promote and inflate their image. What for? If they're not doing it for the Brazilian population, who are they doing it for?
The mentality is the same as a favorite Brazilian pastime: illegal extraction of wood and the raping of the Amazon. That is to say, an extractive mentality: "we will take free software, but we will never give back."
The same goes for India, etc. These countries should be pouring resources into developing and perfecting free software. Instead, in the case of Brazil, people are making money doing puerile things such as installing KDE.
Talk about underdevelopment...
Besides, anything based on GPL software will never empower people in India or Brazil. They cannot compete on the markets with such products. Small software houses will be crushed because they have to give the software for free. There's no choice, such as there is with BSD systems. There are no VCs in the coffee shop nearby for you to beg for cash. This viral infection of GPL in the mentalities of BRIC developers was a terrible mistake propagated by old US American fuddy-duddies with huge amounts of facial hair.
According to local press, the little laptop isn't doing so good. One study in fact (mentioned in Veja news magazine) even found that student's grade got worse, since they became distracted.
The XO laptop was also doing badly because there were not nearly enough qualified teachers. We're talking teachers here that can barely teach with a blackboard and chalk. The international Pisa student evaluation (done in 57 countries) places Brazilian students at the lowest tier in Mathematics proficiency http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/educacao/ult305u351481.shtml (pt_br).
Now, as we all know, even for the lowly Turtle logo, a modicum of Mathematics is necessary for both the student and the teacher.
In this respect, open source (source code) will bring nothing to these students. Maybe for a statistically negligible elite. Well, so be it.
As for the purported 52 mil, the nationwide 2004 school census had the numbers at 8.7 mil for "mid-level" school and 10.7 mil at 17-17 years.
This 52 mil is probably self-promotion bullshit from the chronics at this leftist government, who do nothing but lie in general and specifically with numbers. The only real numbers I can see sprouting forth with any substance is the shitload of money the political free-software clique that revolves around the Worker's Party will make in installing Debian for such a huge basis. Hooray!
There's very little being done in terms of educating teachers so as to harness the power of free software in building knowledge (and the GPL is not good for that - BSD systems would really empower people to sell their work instead of giving it for free).
My feeling from young kids I know from public schools is that Linux will produce nothing but rejection in the end, as soon as they realize you can't play those neat video games in it. You know how kids are, they don't care about the GNU toolchain...Their bottom line thinking is: "no fun - then the fuck with it!"
Anyhow, if I sound against the thing, I just want to say I'm not. I just would not believe the hype. We've seen Brazil and Free Software in the headlines before and in terms of concrete achievements, they have delivered very little.
I don't think you understand the scope of this research. It shows that the neurological correlates influencing violent behaviour are affected. Get it? If it's happening on the brain and it's showing up on the functional imaging exams they did, it's pretty much the real deal. This isn't a game of words - which is what you're doing.
Furthermore, there are studies with children (where the control group is not exposed to violent media) that clearly indicate increase in violent behavior - real violent interaction (e.g., on playgrounds).
I know violence is very much glorified in US American culture (*) (and sadly, it's an export product of the US, via games and morbid TV shows, e.g., CSI (**)), but it's time people stop getting defensive about the accumulating body of evidence.
(*) A thing that very much impressed me were the young tank soldiers in Michael Moore's movie, describing the actual slaughter of people in Iraq as a thrilling video game scene. Wow, talk about being indoctrinated into violence. (**) Somebody explain to me why cadavers are entertainment. This clearly can only be appreciated by people who've never felt the stench of a decomposing corpse - the worst smell one can feel in life.
Slashdot Mirror
Dear Publisher --
You have edited an excellent Mathematics book that has gone out of print. In fact, it has been over 3 decades since you showed any interested in this excellent work. It seems there is no profit to be made out of this fine work.
Since you have demonstrated no interest in the intellectual heritage of mankind, instead of simply letting that fine work rot away in some library - or worse - sent to be recycled by the librarian (who thinks the book is too old to be of any interest), I have decided that I will keep that work alive, by scanning the book and releasing it into the Internet.
I feel you have no claims to copyright or any other such irrational arguments, since you yourself have done nothing to keep that outstanding intellectual achievement alive.
Sincerely yours,
Anonymous,
King of the Internet
The truth is that you can distribute GPL 3 code on any hardware you want, even hardware that refuses to run unsigned binaries, and including the fucking TiVo!
What kind of argument is that? Of course "you can do what you want".
You're missing a whole lot of context here. Hello.
BTW, is it my impression or the number of project that have business-friendly licenses (i.e., can be incorporated in commercial products) has increased?
For instance, Google, etc.
ANyways, who the fuck wants to contribute to a project where the main developer can take your code, say "thanks very much, a-hole" and dual-license the thing while you make no money?
That's the real GPL loophole - it allows someone to get rich while you get none. It's a 0/+ interaction. The BSD license is a +/+ interaction (same rules apply to everyone, and everyone benefits).
I'd *really* like to see all you GPL addicts try to run a small firm selling embedded software/instrumentation/whatever that's GPLed - and having to give all your code to the competition.
Oh, wait, you don't want yo do that. You only want the service model where you work for someone else. You dream of being the salary men (web devs notwithstanding - not all software is a web app).
The GPL model is utterly useless in areas where hardware and software go together.
You are clueless. You no think. Get off the intertubes.
Corporation-friendly BSD vs. Communistic GPL: as someone else already said all the successful free software commercial products I remember are GPL.
You just forgot to mention that they either have licenses (per-seat, for example), are hardware manufacturers (ergo, the software is just a commodity), or dual-license (and therefore, are fucking hypocrites/wiseguys).
Let's keep it honest, shall we?
It's time to ask: What can science learn from Google?
This Wired editor guy is clueless.
People in the bioinformatics and computational biology have been saying these things now for well over a decade (at least). It's not about Google. It's not about Craig Venter. What a fucking shame for Wired to have such a pop-science fanboy for editor.
How mainstream and behind the curve Slashdot and Wired have become...
Some people prefer IntelliJ (Java), for example. In the case of Lisp, Java, Smalltalk, Forth and version control there seems to be a tools market.
If you have a vendor that delivers a superior product, why not pay? Isn't that, in the end, like paying for "support" in the FLOSS world? I think so. In fact, vendors will sell you support packages.
I believe there's a sweet spot in there between price and functionality unrivaled by open source tools. Some developers have been able to find it (IntelliJ, for example), others haven't. As with any business, there's a lot of marketing to it. I think UNA's strategy is smart: let the users try the free version and if they like it, and they're not cheapskates, they might upgrade to the collaborative version.
OTOH some vendors charge way too much, that's true (like $ 8000, IIRC, for Smalltalk VisualAge 7: http://www.instantiations.com/VAST/index.html).
Round corners are in.
Grey is out.
Don't forget Polyspace, which I personally have never used - but I would love to. Polyspace is a Standard ML (a higher-order functional programming language) success story, because it relies heavily on the SML MLton compiler. Another thing that makes it a success story is the fact the Mathworks (makers of Matlab) bought it.
The C/C++ version does MISRA-C (the C used in the automotive industry) too.
There's also a version for Ada, of course.
Thanks, Grammar Nazi!
OpenSolaris: What Ubuntu wants to be when it grows up
apt-get is not perfect. In fact, you may call "a hack." I don't think there's any real "theory" behind it. apt-get may even remove a user's kernel package, as one of the 600 traces in this study reveals:
OPIUM: Optimal Package Install/Uninstall Manager
http://pho.ucsd.edu/rjhala/papers/opium.html
Also worth reading are:
Search heuristics and optimisations to solve package
installability problems by constraint programming
http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/report_ingi2800_C.pdf[pdf]
Maintaining large software distributions:
new challenges from the FOSS era
http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/bibrefs/EDOS-FRCSS06.html
where they mention "Theorem 1 (Package installability is an NP-complete problem). Checking whether a single package
P can be installed, given a repository R, is NP-complete." (result is to be published elsewhere, though).
It's about not handing control over to a big corporation that has a fetid track-record of corrupting standards and standard bodies.
Unfortunately, Bruce, that does not the match reality of how these laptops are being used.
I don't see teachers in sufficient numbers being prepared to take advantage of open source. In Brazil (where I live), I see teachers that can barely teach their subject with a blackboard and white chalk.
What I see is cool and nice that kids have it, but it is miles away form Seymour Papert's dream. Or Alan Kay's dream.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovG_k2b3AXU
When I was in 5th grade, I was taught Logo. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. These kids have Squeak. Squeak has the potential to blow your mind, because Squeak is multimedia-ready (and cool projects like Scratch have been developed on top of it).
But it seems that it ammounts to having a cool little laptop that can network.
There's nothing intrinsic to it that demands open source OS. Unfortunately, because ideally one would want to be able to go very, very deep. The project seems to fall short in that respect.
What are these kids learning that will teach them that it is the human that makes the computer?
That, to me, is the true "technological transfer."
So, the way the project has been led has been self-defeating, IMHO.
The last point I would like to make is that the GPL license does not, and will not, empower people in India, Brazil, or any other developing nation. This was a big mistake. Only a liberal license like the BSD license can empower people, permiting them to compete in a hostile commercial environment, contributing to a common source but not naively exposing one self to bigger corporations that would crush their businesses (unless they want to play the hypocritical "dual-licensing" - an euphemism to proprietary licensing).
My country has a problem that I perceive as a big issue: although, in theory, freedom of expression is guaranteed by law, in practice, you will get your ass seriously sued if you touch on some flaming issue (which can be anything the person on the other end of the screen thinks).
Journalists that work for big media outlets don't have this problem so much here in Brazil because they have teams of lawyers to fight the legal battles. But any blogger can get in serious trouble. Having to sell your furniture because of debt due to legal bills sucks.
Just this week I read about one such "intimidation attempt" (as I like to call it). The journalist, wisely, had hosted hist site on a US provider. According to him, the offended party could do nothing to him (meaning, couldn't take the content off line).
What can Freenet do for those cases? Do you access web pages, are there forums, or do you just download/upload stuff/files? And can content be hosted on Freenet but be seen by non-Freenet users (which I think would be the ideal thing for bloggers and journalists and other whistle-blowers)?
Here's a video with subtitles in English on the use of the OLPC in a classroom (public school in southern Brazil *)
http://br.youtube.com/watch?v=ovG_k2b3AXU
This is miles away from what Alan Kay is thinking, IMHO. This use of computers in the classroom is pretty much closer to what Bill Gates has written about. In my mind, this falls short and aims at a much lower target.
If that is the purported revolution in education than the deployment of open-source is self-defeating, because there's nothing that could not be done by Wintel machines.
The problem is much, much deeper than "52 mil" KDE users. It concerns the whole educational system. And it the problems are the same in the public schools of the US or Brazil. Or probably anywhere.
* Higher social-economic indicators than the North/North-eastern region.
I agree that modern education is not antithetical to other basic needs. I just don't think the Brazilian government has done its homework in what concerns teacher education. Teachers in the public schools earn very little and perform very badly.
I don't see them prepared to take advantage of an open source software platform. Of course, it will help to research and plug those minds to the internet and that alone is fantastic.
But I don't really think that should be the goal of computer use in public schools of Brazil or Tanzania (BTW, these two countries have huge differences in their parameters of health and income).
But then you have to ask what it means to be "computer literate." For one thing, if it means using Word and Excel- i.e. prepare them for today's menial jobs - than this project falls short (obviously). OTOH, if you understand that being computer literate is something along the lines of what Seymour Papert and Alan Kay thought it was, than I think this will fail miserably. IMHO, at the very least the student needs to understand the basic fact that the software in a computer is made by people and it doesn't come magically out of a town of Redmond, somewhere in the US of A.
Linux is already sold pre-installed on cheap hardware in Brazil. They sit right next to Vista boxen, with a pathetic resource-hungry KDE desktop, full of little click-on menus (mail, browser). Here's a photo: http://www.link.estadao.com.br/index.cfm?id_conteudo=12583
The first thing users do is remove Linux and install a pirate XP.
The type of user who buys this is someone who needs a computer but doesn't want to pay the more expensive MS product. He knows shit about Linux and would like to install MS Office (pirate) on it. His 10 year-old is all excited, thinking he now is gonna be able to play awsome video games and outcool the kids in the hood that have PS2. Heh. The cruely of it all.
There's absolutely nothing securing more future Microsoft mindshare than the Linux boxen being sold in Brazil.
Yes.
The joy of not caring about what the X.org dudes will do next to fuck up my GUI experience.
No, Apples and Windows. Totally different things. One is not edible, does not taste nice and will leave your mouth full of cuts and all bloody if you try to digest it.
True. However, since Mac OS X is UNIX (certified) and since FreeBSD is part of Mac OS userland, my FreeBSD is more UNIX than their Linux. :-) Ok, fanboys, don't get all fussy now.
Yes, and you can also freely contribute for the betterment of MySQL sending them patches which they will gleefully include in their next stable release, just as soon as you fill those forms saying you give up on your copyrights, so that they can package your work and sell it for big bucks.
Yes, GPL software is great for (someone else's) business.
If Brazil's free software government initiative was serious, you would have a gazillion Brazilian C++ hackers toiling away at OpenOffice, all under a federal payroll.
Some will say "but what has government to do with funding software development?" Of course, these hypocrites will then go and praise the Brazilian government for their support of open source software.
Now, you talk to anybody in those Brazilian IT agencies and guys will tell you that they "used to program in Cobol" (or a funny Assembler flavor, or something funky on a bygone mainframe). Or: they're using Microsoft (in all honesty: there's Java, too). Because of Excel and Word, the all pervasive Microsoft killer apps.
Now, I absolutely loathe the parasitic brain-dead political clique that infected the Brazilian free software "scene". This is the second term of this leftist government, composed of pathological liars (some of which, BTW, are under investigation and are looking at some jail time) that like to promote and inflate their image. What for? If they're not doing it for the Brazilian population, who are they doing it for?
The mentality is the same as a favorite Brazilian pastime: illegal extraction of wood and the raping of the Amazon. That is to say, an extractive mentality: "we will take free software, but we will never give back."
The same goes for India, etc. These countries should be pouring resources into developing and perfecting free software. Instead, in the case of Brazil, people are making money doing puerile things such as installing KDE.
Talk about underdevelopment...
Besides, anything based on GPL software will never empower people in India or Brazil. They cannot compete on the markets with such products. Small software houses will be crushed because they have to give the software for free. There's no choice, such as there is with BSD systems. There are no VCs in the coffee shop nearby for you to beg for cash. This viral infection of GPL in the mentalities of BRIC developers was a terrible mistake propagated by old US American fuddy-duddies with huge amounts of facial hair.
According to local press, the little laptop isn't doing so good. One study in fact (mentioned in Veja news magazine) even found that student's grade got worse, since they became distracted.
The XO laptop was also doing badly because there were not nearly enough qualified teachers. We're talking teachers here that can barely teach with a blackboard and chalk. The international Pisa student evaluation (done in 57 countries) places Brazilian students at the lowest tier in Mathematics proficiency http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/educacao/ult305u351481.shtml (pt_br).
Now, as we all know, even for the lowly Turtle logo, a modicum of Mathematics is necessary for both the student and the teacher.
In this respect, open source (source code) will bring nothing to these students. Maybe for a statistically negligible elite. Well, so be it.
As for the purported 52 mil, the nationwide 2004 school census had the numbers at 8.7 mil for "mid-level" school and 10.7 mil at 17-17 years.
http://br.monografias.com/trabalhos/educacao-pobreza-brasil/educacao-pobreza-brasil2.shtml (pt_br)
This 52 mil is probably self-promotion bullshit from the chronics at this leftist government, who do nothing but lie in general and specifically with numbers. The only real numbers I can see sprouting forth with any substance is the shitload of money the political free-software clique that revolves around the Worker's Party will make in installing Debian for such a huge basis. Hooray!
There's very little being done in terms of educating teachers so as to harness the power of free software in building knowledge (and the GPL is not good for that - BSD systems would really empower people to sell their work instead of giving it for free).
My feeling from young kids I know from public schools is that Linux will produce nothing but rejection in the end, as soon as they realize you can't play those neat video games in it. You know how kids are, they don't care about the GNU toolchain...Their bottom line thinking is: "no fun - then the fuck with it!"
Anyhow, if I sound against the thing, I just want to say I'm not. I just would not believe the hype. We've seen Brazil and Free Software in the headlines before and in terms of concrete achievements, they have delivered very little.
What they didn't prove:
Violent imagery makes you violent.
I don't think you understand the scope of this research. It shows that the neurological correlates influencing violent behaviour are affected.
Get it? If it's happening on the brain and it's showing up on the functional imaging exams they did, it's pretty much the real deal.
This isn't a game of words - which is what you're doing.
Furthermore, there are studies with children (where the control group is not exposed to violent media) that clearly indicate increase in violent behavior - real violent interaction (e.g., on playgrounds).
I know violence is very much glorified in US American culture (*) (and sadly, it's an export product of the US, via games and morbid TV shows, e.g., CSI (**)), but it's time people stop getting defensive about the accumulating body of evidence.
(*) A thing that very much impressed me were the young tank soldiers in Michael Moore's movie, describing the actual slaughter of people in Iraq as a thrilling video game scene. Wow, talk about being indoctrinated into violence.
(**) Somebody explain to me why cadavers are entertainment. This clearly can only be appreciated by people who've never felt the stench of a decomposing corpse - the worst smell one can feel in life.