Actually, the report was wrong; the first Indianised version of Linux is actually Tamil Linux. In any case, you can use Win XP to type in a few Indic languages, although Bengali is not one of them, and for sure, the UI is still English.
The number of English speakers, quite frankly, is actually miniscule relatively speaking, even if the absolute numbers are big; the vast majority of India's population would presumably prefer their own vernacular to English to communicate. The biggest detriment to Indianisation of computer technologies is the plain complexity involved; understanding how to render Indic characters is, let's face it, a pretty tough job. The result being there's a lot of chaos out there; loads of fonts in many languages, but very few of them are either ISCII or Unicode compliant.
Hmm, let me see, from India's perspective , the bigger challanges are....
Perhaps you wanted to say "an Indian's perspective" as opposed to "India's perspective". Surely, you don't claim to represent all of India, do you?
Poverty:- The country's wealth is divided by the 90-10 rule. i.e. 10% of the population has 90% of the wealth.
With all due respects, you weren't talking about poverty, but wealth distribution. The US, as a matter of fact, has a much worse wealth distribution than India; I believe the figure is more like 99-1. Or something like that; please correct me if I'm wrong.
Point being, the great challenge for India is greater wealth creation and not just a fairer wealth distribution. Which is exactly what our new focus on science and technology will do; more investment, more jobs, greater talent.
Illiteracy:- More than 50%. And since being literate means being able to sign your name, the actual figures could be as high as 70-75%
In the BiMaRu cow-belt, yes. Much of the North East has a very high literacy rate (78-ish), Kerala already has 100%, TN and Karnataka's are in the 80's and 90's, and Andhra Pradesh is apparently set to achieve 100% literacy by 2005.
Infrastructure:- One of the world's worst .
Seen the new Pune - Mumbai highway?
So much Red tape everywhere.
This, by rights, is a point different from infrastructure, but again, to strike a positive note, google for "e-seva" in Andhra Pradesh.
Transportation and Safety:- Barring major cities, public transport is a mess and not every one can afford their own vehicle. Road/Rail accidents account for most no. of deaths in the country.
Public transport is a mess in many of the world's interior regions, but again, the breakdown is more regional than anything; Karnataka's KSRTC, for instance, has an extensive bus system, while other states have much less
humbly pointing out what our top priorities should be.
Indeed, this is where you and I disagree; by no stretch of anyone's imagination should we think that our scientific goals are our "national" priorities that take precedence over all the, valid I must add, problems India faces, even going by financial allocation alone. My point is that there's a lot of policy initiative and some good work done on all of the problems you've mentioned, but that we need political and, perhaps, bureaucratic, leadership to tackle them. That is to say, our social problems should not be confused with our technological goals; the first is tackled by bureaucrats and politicians, the second by scientists in their field of interest. Two different things.
More to the point, we apparently have one of the world's largest bases of scientific talent, and for sure, we can't match salaries they'd get elsewhere. One bloddy good way of making talent stay in the country is by setting challenging technological goals and adding liberal doses (pun unintended) of patriotism to make the talent achieve them.
But again, you are absolutely right; corruption, low literacy, bad infrastructure and so on are endemic problems, and I, for one, wish for some stronger political leadership in tackling those. (Obviously, and this is perhaps where we'll agree, while there has been some good work, I don't quite think there's enough energy being devoted, at least on a national level)
Work visas are available and are open to all nationalities, if you are interested. Contact your nearest Indian Embassy for more details.
In fact, this might seem ironic for all of you complaining about H1-B programs, but India actually has one of the largest migrant populations in the world; we get a lot of foreign labour (and students) from Bangladesh, Nepal, Myanmar, and a couple of African countries.
I should know; a friend back home in India has neighbours from Somalia.
India would have never developed ANY kind of education system or economic structure if it were not for the British making a colony of the place and, building unversities.
The star-universities in question, the IIT's (Indian Institute of Technology) and the IIM's (Indian Institute of Management), were actually set up after Independence from British Raj.
In any case, you really can't credit the colonials for "inventing" laissez faire capitalism (although they did, admittedly, write about the process first); you want to read up more on the medieval maritime trade between, say, the ancient ports at (among other places) Mangalore and Mausalia, and heartland Europe/Middle East.
McKinsey's senior partner, Rajat Gupta, is an IIT-alumnus.:-)
That said, it's probably a much more interesting ceiling to breach; one of the downsides of this outsourcing/techie explosion is that Indians are apparently being stereo-typed as being too "techie", and hence, not management material.
Personally, I'd like to think Indians have as much chance as any other ethnicity (or may be a wee bit better than, say, the Russians or Chinese, because of a familiarity with English, but again, my experience has been that language skills give you only a temporary advantage)
Congratulations, you've just described a policy concept known as 'technology leverage', a concept that semi-conductor companies successfully implemented in the late-80's and 90's, to prop up the semi-conductor industries in the so-called Asian Tiger economies. It's also the same concept by which, say, Suzuki brought its manufacturing base to India, and Hitachi (?) bringing its mass-transit-trains manufacturing to India (Delhi's new metro system, for instance; the first trains there were all imported, but soon, they'll be locally manufactured. With this knowledge transfer, urban transport infrastructure development in India would be so much more simple, both in cost terms and in expertise).
Just that, this is not what's happening with regards to software outsourcing to India.
Remember, most of the software/call-center outsourcing is actually handled by Indian companies; American companies (such as Accenture, IBM Global Services etc) have setup shop in India only recently. That is to say, Indian companies have already reached world standards (or have tried to) in order to compete with international (outsourcing) companies. A fine distinction, but crucial, especially given the rise of China as an IT (as opposed to manufacturing/FDI) challenger; it would mean Indian companies have the skills and resources to compete on their own terms.
That said, you're right; there is a lot of technology leverage in other growth spheres as well. Low cost drug research, for instance, is one market that's looking exceedingly big if you are an Indian policy analyst, and for sure, it will infuse "true" R&D skills into India's generic drugs industry. But for outsourcing per se, I don't think there's any technology leverage here.
Ah yes. Thanks for the link; back when I was in the scene in India, there were always urban legends on how l33t (and evil, of course) Pakistani hackers created the world's first virus. The link finally substantiates all of those old stories now.
Interesting, btw, that the brothers Alvi now head a large ISP in their country. I suppose it's one of history's great ironies.
I said with so much certainity mainly because earlier research into the topology of the Web, by Barabasi et al had already suggested that it is a so-called scale-free network (my post in the earlier story on this had more references), which, arguably, are fractals.
You know, I find it really irritating to defend Eastern cultures every second day here on/. especially when people miss the point by miles, but really:-
Abstraction from physical objects has allowed us to develop things like abstract mathematics and music.
And the Chinese don't have abstract mathematics or music? As in, what's the relevance to the abstraction you're talking about?
Sure there are problems (environmental, societal, economic, political, spiritual) and things we could improve;
Potentially by integrating our worldview with theirs, perhaps?
but now we have the material security and scientific knowledge to begin dealing with those issues, and what is to say that any other civilization would be any better at dealing with these issues, anyway?
See, exactly what I was talking about. You have a clear-cut linear view, you go from X to Y and then to Z. Nothing wrong with that, mind you, but that's not how a few other civilisations look at things. They see things in a unified spectrum; they don't, for instance, cut down the trees in their sacred land not for the trees themselves, but because cutting them down would cause their ancient spirits to become angry, who, in turn, will influence the Cloud Gods, who, again, with the Wind God and the Rain God, will cause havoc to their settlement. A worldview that's, at once, more complex than the usual mode of thought.
I don't know if it's more responsible or not, but all the same, it's an intriguing point to ask what do they see that we don't.
The adored Chinese worldview appears to have produced a stagnant behemoth unable to compete with modernity, nor provide the standard of living to the masses that we all take for granted.
You could say the same thing about the ancient Roman Empire as well. Nothing uniquely Chinese about stagnation.
In addition, ancient China referred to itself as the 'middle kingdom', i.e. the center of the world (which is partly why it failed to keep up). That's pretty self-centered in my book.
I was going to post on how stupid that comment is, considering how closed-minded some of the Americans I meet are, but I'll pass. Here's a more positive argument:- heard of Zheng He? At his time, his ships were the largest in the world, at least five times bigger than the equivalent Portuguese ships.
Which brings us to the real point here:- the Chinese, as with the Indians, didn't need to explore the world as much as the then Europeans did. Renaissance-time exploration was actually an effort by the Europeans to take over the trade routes for spices; back then, they didn't have refrigeration, so they had to depend on spices to preserve their meat. Unfortunately for the Europeans, the Arab (this includes Muslim, Jewish AND Christian) middle-men had complete control over this trade, so they set out to find a sea route to the East to capture control over this trade (which they did very easily, mostly because the native rulers in Arabia, India and elsewhere were more experienced in trade negotiations than in political, that is, military, negotiations.)
In short, NOTHING to do with linguistics and everything to do with basic economics.
Finally, it is the development of modern science (in partciular astronomy) that has fundamentially changed our view of the Universe; we now know that we are but a small planet orbiting an average star in an average Galaxy etc etc. That's pretty humbling, and entirely the fruit of western thought.
Two words:- Chamyogya Upanishad. Verse 211 or something.
Unfortunately, this one of those cultural artifacts that are beyond the reach of Google, so you probably won't know what I'm talking about, but let's put it this way:- it's one of the first references in world literature to the fact that the Earth is, as a matter of fact, revolving around the Sun, and not vice versa. This some 3000 years before Copernicus.
from what I know of his character, he was probably not a sexist or prone to any other form of bigotry;
He was an atheist and [most likely] a homosexual, and was therefore very much an 'outsider' himself in his times)
Yes, read about that myself. Back in their time, the math guys had a club of sorts didn't they, where they used to discuss matters of civi, and academic, interest.
Oh, elocution and debates are popular in Indian universities as well. The difference, and this I say after much interaction with Filipino friends, is that the Filipino accent is closer to the mainstream American accent than the Indian accent is (possibly as a result of the American occupation till WW2, and greater interaction with the international economy).
Indian English, OTOH, is more than an accent, it's a self-sustaining dialect; loads of words from Indian languages get absorbed into the English lexicon even if the words are not often used outside India ('ek dum', 'gherao', 'bandobust', 'bandh', 'bandicoot' come to my mind). Tagalog-English (Tinglish?) doesn't have that measure of acceptability just as yet; I guess it'll improve once we get more quality Filipino-English literature or something.
In fact, I often find myself using different nuances while speaking with Indian friends and with international friends in English; my accent is more or less same, but I definitely use a different word-set. I haven't heard any (Americanised) Indian call center folks speak, so it'll be extremely interesting to see what sort of effect this call-center business will have on Indian English.
Large companies such as Infosys, I understand, already have backup operations set up in an unnamed Mauritian island, and have agreements with the Mauritian government to provide fast-track visas for its staff in case of emergencies.
Whaaa? How long is it going to take these nations to develop, anyway? I mean, they've only been civilizations for, um, how many millenium was it last time I checked.
While I understand that you were trying to be funny, you perhaps have no idea how infuriating such statements are to those from these developing nations (I wouldn't say 'offended' which would be in the league of racial or ethnic insensitivity, I'm sure you mean well). I, personally, am neither infuriated nor offended, merely irritated, and here's why.
You see, there are many of us out here who tend to think that the so-called 'developed' world has stolen our wealth (considering the relative prosperities of, say, China or India before and after the European colonials took over our trade routes) and is still bent upon subjugation based on their own rules (google for 'agricultural subsidies').
Now, that's obviously only half the truth, the other half is how the rulers of the developing countries themselves have misappropriated the nations' wealth, and to be sure, I'm one of those people who tend to think that the developing countries can compete with anyone (and develop to world standards) if we get our priorities right, but still, just to tell you why many people tend to think people from the developed world are arrogant, brash, condescending and plain ignorant.
I really don't want to fan a flame, but perhaps you should watch the video and read the summary closely.
Here's how I understood it:- two brothers have certain issues with their iPod battery. They call up Apple support and ask if there's anything they can do about it, presumably because, as you mentioned, it's an expensive toy and would want to do things the Right Way (tm). Apple support says, sorry, your replacement costs US$250/-, which, obviously, pisses them off to creatively protest about it.
I know I would be pissed off, never mind the fact that there's some odd-ball third-party site offering a cheaper alternative, or if Apple's webpage disagrees with their support staff; most people tend to believe (in) what they've been told by the concerned people, as opposed to reading something off the net. In other words, this is not so much a case of showing off your l33t googling skills, as it is of companies telling apparently wrong pieces of information through what's a blatantly one-way mode of communication.
To be sure, that's one reason why I'd actually applaud their graffiti; it is a sureshot way of getting back at the company by hitting where it hurts. Whether they are correct in their assertion is a moot point, really; as you've so successfully pointed out, there's no reason for us to believe their statement. But all the same, it is Apple which has to respond to the video, not us.
I mean, is it me, or can't some people stand anything being said against Apple?
Hasn't this obsession with sanitizing speech become a total farce? What's next?
I was reading this book on Visual Communication which, among other things, uses the term 'Anglos' to describe a certain ethnic race in the US. Took me a while to understand that 'Anglos' was a reference to White American Males. (Which, in a way, was sad, 'coz the book otherwise made some very good comments on stereotypes in visual ethnography; silly word games such as this distract you from the real message)
As for this particular case, I wouldn't read too much into it. It's a bit like those 19th century attempts at legislating the value of Pi to be 3; more than anything, it's a display of what someone with administrative power will do if they see something unpalatable, even if it's beyond their natural domain.
Already there. Most people don't know that India's Moon mission, Chandrayaan 1, has some element of Canadian involvement as well.
One of the bigger problems, IMHO, between, say, Indian and Chinese space cooperation is two-fold:- a) the goals are different, b) the Chinese (and, let's admit it, to a large extent even the Indians, although this seems to be changing now) have largely been secretive about their mission.
That, and as such, there's very little scientific cooperation between the two countries. It'll be very interesting if that happens in the near future.
In a sense, the results of the project do seem to match earlier research on the topology of the web; at a glance, the graph arrived at, does seem to be scale-free in nature.
Which, actually raises an interesting question. Scale free networks, by their nature, are supposed to have certain highly connected nodes, the connectivity of which, is extremely critical to the network as a whole.
In particular, look at the resultant graph for one-third of the net. Note the single link in the middle between two nodes that seems to connect all four sub-trees together. Now imagine that link being, say, DDoS'ed. (You can see it in the one-fifth-of-the-net graph as well; only, it's more clear here)
(Additional points for all you neurologists out there:- we've been comparing the structure of the human brain with that of the Internet, do you know of any such neurons?)
[Even more points:- Will you tell the world if you've found one?:-) ]
A point well-taken, actually. Didn't know about Prohibition-Era laws or the legal nuances of the War Against Drugs.
My point, and I probably should have said this earlier itself, was that it's actually fairly easy for Singaporeans to have bubble gum despite its sale being banned; since gum is allowed into Singapore, all that they have to do is to pop into Malaysia, which is a mere 30 minutes away by bus, get the gum, and pop back.
However, I suppose you are right in a sense; people, by nature, are lazy, and I daresay, not many would feel like crossing the border just to get a teeny-weeny piece of bubble gum.
Slashdot Mirror
The number of English speakers, quite frankly, is actually miniscule relatively speaking, even if the absolute numbers are big; the vast majority of India's population would presumably prefer their own vernacular to English to communicate. The biggest detriment to Indianisation of computer technologies is the plain complexity involved; understanding how to render Indic characters is, let's face it, a pretty tough job. The result being there's a lot of chaos out there; loads of fonts in many languages, but very few of them are either ISCII or Unicode compliant.
Hmm, let me see, from India's perspective , the bigger challanges are ....
Perhaps you wanted to say "an Indian's perspective" as opposed to "India's perspective". Surely, you don't claim to represent all of India, do you?
Poverty :- The country's wealth is divided by the 90-10 rule. i.e. 10% of the population has 90% of the wealth.
With all due respects, you weren't talking about poverty, but wealth distribution. The US, as a matter of fact, has a much worse wealth distribution than India; I believe the figure is more like 99-1. Or something like that; please correct me if I'm wrong.
Point being, the great challenge for India is greater wealth creation and not just a fairer wealth distribution. Which is exactly what our new focus on science and technology will do; more investment, more jobs, greater talent.
Illiteracy :- More than 50%. And since being literate means being able to sign your name, the actual figures could be as high as 70-75%
In the BiMaRu cow-belt, yes. Much of the North East has a very high literacy rate (78-ish), Kerala already has 100%, TN and Karnataka's are in the 80's and 90's, and Andhra Pradesh is apparently set to achieve 100% literacy by 2005.
Infrastructure :- One of the world's worst .
Seen the new Pune - Mumbai highway?
So much Red tape everywhere.
This, by rights, is a point different from infrastructure, but again, to strike a positive note, google for "e-seva" in Andhra Pradesh.
Transportation and Safety :- Barring major cities, public transport is a mess and not every one can afford their own vehicle. Road/Rail accidents account for most no. of deaths in the country.
Public transport is a mess in many of the world's interior regions, but again, the breakdown is more regional than anything; Karnataka's KSRTC, for instance, has an extensive bus system, while other states have much less
humbly pointing out what our top priorities should be.
Indeed, this is where you and I disagree; by no stretch of anyone's imagination should we think that our scientific goals are our "national" priorities that take precedence over all the, valid I must add, problems India faces, even going by financial allocation alone. My point is that there's a lot of policy initiative and some good work done on all of the problems you've mentioned, but that we need political and, perhaps, bureaucratic, leadership to tackle them. That is to say, our social problems should not be confused with our technological goals; the first is tackled by bureaucrats and politicians, the second by scientists in their field of interest. Two different things.
More to the point, we apparently have one of the world's largest bases of scientific talent, and for sure, we can't match salaries they'd get elsewhere. One bloddy good way of making talent stay in the country is by setting challenging technological goals and adding liberal doses (pun unintended) of patriotism to make the talent achieve them.
But again, you are absolutely right; corruption, low literacy, bad infrastructure and so on are endemic problems, and I, for one, wish for some stronger political leadership in tackling those. (Obviously, and this is perhaps where we'll agree, while there has been some good work, I don't quite think there's enough energy being devoted, at least on a national level)
It'll be interesting, though, to see, say, Steve Ballmer's reaction to the title of the guy's talk. (I'm talking about the first link, obviously)
The speaker has an blog entry on the event on his home page.
In fact, this might seem ironic for all of you complaining about H1-B programs, but India actually has one of the largest migrant populations in the world; we get a lot of foreign labour (and students) from Bangladesh, Nepal, Myanmar, and a couple of African countries.
I should know; a friend back home in India has neighbours from Somalia.
In any case, you really can't credit the colonials for "inventing" laissez faire capitalism (although they did, admittedly, write about the process first); you want to read up more on the medieval maritime trade between, say, the ancient ports at (among other places) Mangalore and Mausalia, and heartland Europe/Middle East.
That said, it's probably a much more interesting ceiling to breach; one of the downsides of this outsourcing/techie explosion is that Indians are apparently being stereo-typed as being too "techie", and hence, not management material.
Personally, I'd like to think Indians have as much chance as any other ethnicity (or may be a wee bit better than, say, the Russians or Chinese, because of a familiarity with English, but again, my experience has been that language skills give you only a temporary advantage)
Just that, this is not what's happening with regards to software outsourcing to India.
Remember, most of the software/call-center outsourcing is actually handled by Indian companies; American companies (such as Accenture, IBM Global Services etc) have setup shop in India only recently. That is to say, Indian companies have already reached world standards (or have tried to) in order to compete with international (outsourcing) companies. A fine distinction, but crucial, especially given the rise of China as an IT (as opposed to manufacturing/FDI) challenger; it would mean Indian companies have the skills and resources to compete on their own terms.
That said, you're right; there is a lot of technology leverage in other growth spheres as well. Low cost drug research, for instance, is one market that's looking exceedingly big if you are an Indian policy analyst, and for sure, it will infuse "true" R&D skills into India's generic drugs industry. But for outsourcing per se, I don't think there's any technology leverage here.
Interesting, btw, that the brothers Alvi now head a large ISP in their country. I suppose it's one of history's great ironies.
You sure it's not because of a macro virus?
I said with so much certainity mainly because earlier research into the topology of the Web, by Barabasi et al had already suggested that it is a so-called scale-free network (my post in the earlier story on this had more references), which, arguably, are fractals.
I don't know if it's more responsible or not, but all the same, it's an intriguing point to ask what do they see that we don't.
You could say the same thing about the ancient Roman Empire as well. Nothing uniquely Chinese about stagnation. I was going to post on how stupid that comment is, considering how closed-minded some of the Americans I meet are, but I'll pass. Here's a more positive argument:- heard of Zheng He? At his time, his ships were the largest in the world, at least five times bigger than the equivalent Portuguese ships.Which brings us to the real point here:- the Chinese, as with the Indians, didn't need to explore the world as much as the then Europeans did. Renaissance-time exploration was actually an effort by the Europeans to take over the trade routes for spices; back then, they didn't have refrigeration, so they had to depend on spices to preserve their meat. Unfortunately for the Europeans, the Arab (this includes Muslim, Jewish AND Christian) middle-men had complete control over this trade, so they set out to find a sea route to the East to capture control over this trade (which they did very easily, mostly because the native rulers in Arabia, India and elsewhere were more experienced in trade negotiations than in political, that is, military, negotiations.)
In short, NOTHING to do with linguistics and everything to do with basic economics.
Two words:- Chamyogya Upanishad. Verse 211 or something.Unfortunately, this one of those cultural artifacts that are beyond the reach of Google, so you probably won't know what I'm talking about, but let's put it this way:- it's one of the first references in world literature to the fact that the Earth is, as a matter of fact, revolving around the Sun, and not vice versa. This some 3000 years before Copernicus.
No it isn't; it has fractional dimensions. In which case, will be interesting to find out what exactly is the dimension.
I find myself using alltheweb more and more these days, although nothing beats Google's news aggregator. As yet, that is.
Indian English, OTOH, is more than an accent, it's a self-sustaining dialect; loads of words from Indian languages get absorbed into the English lexicon even if the words are not often used outside India ('ek dum', 'gherao', 'bandobust', 'bandh', 'bandicoot' come to my mind). Tagalog-English (Tinglish?) doesn't have that measure of acceptability just as yet; I guess it'll improve once we get more quality Filipino-English literature or something.
In fact, I often find myself using different nuances while speaking with Indian friends and with international friends in English; my accent is more or less same, but I definitely use a different word-set. I haven't heard any (Americanised) Indian call center folks speak, so it'll be extremely interesting to see what sort of effect this call-center business will have on Indian English.
Large companies such as Infosys, I understand, already have backup operations set up in an unnamed Mauritian island, and have agreements with the Mauritian government to provide fast-track visas for its staff in case of emergencies.
You see, there are many of us out here who tend to think that the so-called 'developed' world has stolen our wealth (considering the relative prosperities of, say, China or India before and after the European colonials took over our trade routes) and is still bent upon subjugation based on their own rules (google for 'agricultural subsidies').
Now, that's obviously only half the truth, the other half is how the rulers of the developing countries themselves have misappropriated the nations' wealth, and to be sure, I'm one of those people who tend to think that the developing countries can compete with anyone (and develop to world standards) if we get our priorities right, but still, just to tell you why many people tend to think people from the developed world are arrogant, brash, condescending and plain ignorant.
Here's how I understood it:- two brothers have certain issues with their iPod battery. They call up Apple support and ask if there's anything they can do about it, presumably because, as you mentioned, it's an expensive toy and would want to do things the Right Way (tm). Apple support says, sorry, your replacement costs US$250/-, which, obviously, pisses them off to creatively protest about it.
I know I would be pissed off, never mind the fact that there's some odd-ball third-party site offering a cheaper alternative, or if Apple's webpage disagrees with their support staff; most people tend to believe (in) what they've been told by the concerned people, as opposed to reading something off the net. In other words, this is not so much a case of showing off your l33t googling skills, as it is of companies telling apparently wrong pieces of information through what's a blatantly one-way mode of communication.
To be sure, that's one reason why I'd actually applaud their graffiti; it is a sureshot way of getting back at the company by hitting where it hurts. Whether they are correct in their assertion is a moot point, really; as you've so successfully pointed out, there's no reason for us to believe their statement. But all the same, it is Apple which has to respond to the video, not us.
I mean, is it me, or can't some people stand anything being said against Apple?
As for this particular case, I wouldn't read too much into it. It's a bit like those 19th century attempts at legislating the value of Pi to be 3; more than anything, it's a display of what someone with administrative power will do if they see something unpalatable, even if it's beyond their natural domain.
One of the bigger problems, IMHO, between, say, Indian and Chinese space cooperation is two-fold:- a) the goals are different, b) the Chinese (and, let's admit it, to a large extent even the Indians, although this seems to be changing now) have largely been secretive about their mission.
That, and as such, there's very little scientific cooperation between the two countries. It'll be very interesting if that happens in the near future.
Yes, a lot of the nodes out there are probably distributing porn. :-)
In a sense, the results of the project do seem to match earlier research on the topology of the web; at a glance, the graph arrived at, does seem to be scale-free in nature.
Which, actually raises an interesting question. Scale free networks, by their nature, are supposed to have certain highly connected nodes, the connectivity of which, is extremely critical to the network as a whole.
In particular, look at the resultant graph for one-third of the net. Note the single link in the middle between two nodes that seems to connect all four sub-trees together. Now imagine that link being, say, DDoS'ed. (You can see it in the one-fifth-of-the-net graph as well; only, it's more clear here)
(Additional points for all you neurologists out there:- we've been comparing the structure of the human brain with that of the Internet, do you know of any such neurons?)
[Even more points:- Will you tell the world if you've found one? :-) ]
My point, and I probably should have said this earlier itself, was that it's actually fairly easy for Singaporeans to have bubble gum despite its sale being banned; since gum is allowed into Singapore, all that they have to do is to pop into Malaysia, which is a mere 30 minutes away by bus, get the gum, and pop back.
However, I suppose you are right in a sense; people, by nature, are lazy, and I daresay, not many would feel like crossing the border just to get a teeny-weeny piece of bubble gum.