I'm surprised nobody on the engineering team pointed out that everything's a power of two if you don't get all mystical and shit about integer exponents. Nice to know we can't even compete in manufacturing against a company run by people who make crucial engineering decisions based on numerology.
Agreed. I found that the better article, as well. Especially interesting was this bit:
Q: Cell has 8 embedded "SPE" CPU cores. What is the basis for this number?
A: Because it's a power of two, that's all there is to it. It's an aesthetic. In the world of computers, the power of two is the fundamental principle - there's no other way. Actually, in the course of development, there's this one occasion when we had an all-night, intense discussion in a U.S. hotel. The IBM team proposed to make it six. But my answer was simple - "the power of two." As a result of insisting on this aesthetic, the chip size ended up being 221mm2, which actually was not desirable for manufacturing.
Blogs are changing the world, but let's not assume it's for the better. The things that make a blog popular are exactly THE SAME THINGS THAT MAKE A MAJOR MEDIA OUTLET POPULAR. The most read blogs are the ones that trade integrity for sensation, and talk to the lowest common denominator. And the idea that it's an enabler of the masses is a joke. People don't have any more time to listen to bloggers than they had to listen to corporate TV or radio. So only a select few bloggers do, and even can, rise to the top to have any significant impact. (And then, of course, they become corporate.)
There is a certain "physics" to all of this, and the only thing we've changed are the names and the channels. The same fundamental properties are always at work, though. You can't change certain aspects of the way people get information from other people.
Just because a billion people COULD read what you wrote on the net is irrelevent. When the billion people on the internet are also contributing a billion of their own blogs, it's not so compelling anymore. What will come from this situation is the same solution that has arisen from EVERY other new form of media that has ever been invented: a corporatization will emerge to promote and profit from the best of what is out there.
I agree with a lot of what you said, but part of my original point was that the second one of the grassroots people starts to catch on, they become corporate. This mixing between the two worlds seems to be one of the dominant mechanisms for producing corporate media, in fact. My guess is that relatively few people are as manufactured as Britney. Look at Dave Mathews, for example. He was out there doing his thing for a long time before getting picked up. Either you acknowledge that he is still worthwhile now that he's working for he corporations, or that he never was because he was willing to "sell out". Everybody comes from nowhere, which is why I find this idea of "corporate" media so specious. The problem, if anything, is not the corporations but the masses to whom they market. The corporations are just a reflection of us, and maybe that's what people hate the most.
This is supposed to be "citizens media" finally being recognized for the inexorable power it is, huh? Now we'll finally hear from "real people"? So, I suppose the DJs doing their shows before weren't citizens. But will we all of a sudden want to listen to those same DJs were they to put their schtick on an MP3 and accept no pay? Arguably not, but the podcasting cheerleaders seem to think that we'll certainly want to hear from some people with no training or prior interest in broadcasting. Yeah, that makes sense.
This is only considered a big deal by those folks who are so politically overcharged with their own bullshit that they buy into the notion of "corporations" vs. "us", as if corporations are somehow staffed by evil robots and the only real people are living in San Francisco working for software startups.
My prediction: to the extent podcasting becomes successful, it will begin to approximate the media it supposedly replaces. Just look at the blogs: the most popular ones are now owned by corporations, and are essentially traditional media outlets.
I did get to that page. The important stats to look at are the top 100 data. The top 10 data have an inherent nonlinearity that is very decieving. By measuring how often the results were predominantly one or the other, you take small differences and amplify them greatly. For example, say I had a coin which was slightly more likely to have heads than tails, such that you might see 550 heads in 1000 tosses. Not a huge bias. However, if I did an experiment where I took groups of 100 tosses, and counted how many of them contained more heads then tails, I might find that this were the case 98% of the time. This would make the coin seem highly biased, and this is sort of what's happening in this guy's experiment.
As they say, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. Even people who know what they're doing often make wrong conclusions. This guy's about to start a holy war and he clearly is not well versed in statistical studies.
I'm not sure where you get your statistics, but the Boeings appear to have half the fatal accident rate according to what I've seen, with a few exceptions. Here are fatal accident rates per Million flights:
Airbus A300 1.13 Airbus A310 1.85 Airbus A319/21 0.67 Boeing 727 0.66 Boeing 737 0.62 Boeing 747 1.62 Boeing 757 0.56 Boeing 767 0.46
Now, if you're going to say "Well, the 747 is bigger than the A310 so really it has more fatalities" let me just you a question: When you're taking a flight, do you care about your chances of dying on that flight, or your chances of dying divided by the number of other people alongside you?
More airports is actually the most intelligent solution, by far. If it weren't for the rampant NIMBYism everywhere, helped along by our huge surfeit of lawyers, that's what we'd do.
Not my point. I'd argue that if you don't like something about something that's free, it's still fair to complain about it, even if you can't change it yourself. The person who created it can either ignore you or take it as a suggestion to implement. As long as your critique is truly constructive, there's never any gain in stifling it. People who say shit like "don't complain, it's free" are just taking an opportunity to be purely self-righteous.
That people are calling Rhapsody a failure is ridiculous. They've got 1M subscribers, which I believe is more than any other service. Here's a hint to some of you: just because you personally don't like something doesn't mean it's fair to declare it an objective failure without valid reason. For example, some of you are self-absorbed gasbags who can't see past your own perspective to fathom how anything you dislike could possibly have even a modicum of value; I don't like you because of that, but that doesn't mean you're not successful at what you do.
Same goes for Microsoft or non-OSS, etc. This place is quite the revival tent, sometimes. It's funny how most people here smugly mock religious people, but there's more religion here than on http://www.orm.cc/.
Excellent point. However, to go one step further, I can't wait until the day people quit even suggesting that blogs compete with standard media outlets. They don't. This whole frenzy about blogs is sort of like back when people thought we'd buy our groceries on the net and all the malls in the world would be empty by 2004. Blogs are great, but they are something new and different, not a replacement to professionals who actually have resources other than e-mail and a convenient disregard for standards.
What a fucking useless comment. Let's just stipulate the whole "as soon as you pay for this..." comments for the rest of eternity.
The guy had a valid point, and free or not, his constructive criticism should be welcome here. Are you suggesting anything that's free should be exempt from critique and standards? Like, say, OSS?
Well, I agree with what you said. If it turned out that MSN is stackng the deck explicitly in favor of IIS, that's fairly aggregious. Maybe not illegal, but pretty sorry nonetheless.
I was just pointing out that we have no more reason to suspect MSN of server bias than any of the other engines based on this guy's data, so far. Just by looking at the data, you can tell that there is nothing of statistical significance to the "discrepencies".
Anyway, I'm not saying MSN isn't doing what people allege, I'm just saying the original article provides no compelling support for or against.
Thanks for the link to the original. However, now I'm even more convinced it's nothing! Look at the variation between the four engines: the MSN results actually don't stand out, even though they are the lowest for Apache. For example, there is more difference between Google and Teoma than between Google and MSN. So, are we going to accuse the other search engines of manipulation, too? They exhibit the same level of variation from the apparently unquestionable Google reference.
He said that the distibution of servers from Google's results matched those published by Netcraft
Good point; I didn't catch that in my first reading. Having said that, to be devil's advocate, there's no reason why Google's rankings *should* correlate with the server market share, so the Netcraft correlation really isn't very meaningful. It wouldn't be surprising, for example, if free servers were underrepresented because they tend to be used by low quality sites trying to save money (e.g. spam sites). Google could be biased towards Apache such that it just happens to bring the rankings back up near the existing market shares. It *looks* very coincidental because 68% seems very close to %70. But in the context, it's really not, since MSN has Apache at 63%. So we're talking a perturbation of 2% versus 7%, which isn't such a huge difference.
This is pretty ridiculous. There is no way to account for the million other variables that could confound this, such as:
1) Maybe it is Google discriminating *against* IIS, not Microsoft for.
2) Maybe there is a correlation between things like website type (i.e. corporate vs..org) and use of IIS, and MSN is discriminating for or against that other, correlated variable.
Probably nobody will read this, due to my prior offense of posting something politically incorrect and getting bad karma (a nice feature of/. is that it self corrects for any diversity of opinion) but the answer to your question is that you can sample a periodic signal at a total aggregate rate which is much higher than the bandwidth of any individual component by sampling over many periods. For example, electro-optical samplers grab small measurements at slightly different offsets to the period, and after a while you get a picture of the signal. That's why all oscilloscopes above a certain bandwidth (a few hundred MHz, I think) are all sampling oscilloscopes.
We license cars for safety reasons, I don't see any good reason why guns shouldn't have something similar.
I'm still on the fence about this myself. One difference is that cars operate in a common public space. On the other hand, somebody who has been threatened and who feels the need to have a gun available in their home probably shouldn't have to wait six weeks for a course to put something in their own house. Maybe a license should be required to carry or use a gun outside one's property.
I wonder, how much force would it take to make it not worth it? I would think a fairly impressive amount (i.e. tanks, or tens of thousands of people with machine guns)
Exactly, thousands of people with guns. That's the whole point of the second amendment. It makes it really hard to get away with anything horrible, like internment of a large population.
In the end, military operations always come down to people. In the case of the government, most likely local police or federal agents (most folks in our military would be unwilling to engage citizens, one of the reasons the feds like to have goons like the ATF). The second amendment is meaningless unless citizens have similar firepower to the people the government would use. A government that's wary of its citizens as a whole is probably a good thing. It seems ludicrous now, I know. But if, in the distant future, it ever looks like it might not be so ludicrous, there will be no way to get our guns back then if we give them up now.
Finally, here's another argument: some people don't like the idea of having to rely on the government for their protection, or have reason to expect little service in that regard. So, if the police deem it neccesary to have assault rifles to protect honest citizens, then honest citizens should be allowed to have them if they so choose to protect themselves.
Well said. You make a very good argument. Obviously, I don't think people should have nukes. Nukes should never stray from governments. What makes assault rifles fundamentally different is that they're out there. So, gun laws banning them just disarm honest citizens. I think that's the part of "our side" that "your side" doesn't really understand. If I could magically take all guns away, I probably would. But there's something wrong with a government that's afraid of it's honest citizens owning something dangerous. It's frustrating to see honest people lose rights over the naive feel-good idea that gun laws work. If someone doesn't care about murder laws, why the heck would they care about gun laws? Every gun crime is done in violation of multiple gun laws. The kids at Columbine broke dozens. Anyway, it's obviously easier for politicians to get self-righteous about the guns than actually solve the underlying causes of violence, which are complex and expensive to fix. So I think NRA-types are justifiably pissed about the whole thing. They are losing something dear to them solely for politcal capital of small minded politicians.
Finally, the whole overthrow the government thing is still valid! You don't need to be able to win, you just need to be able to resist with enough force to make it not worth it. The first thing every tyrant does is disarm the citizens. One of the first things the Nazis did was disarm the Jews.
Well said, except for you first paragraph being a prime example of what you chastice. You demonstrate my point by suggesting that it's ok to own a handgun but not an "assault" rifle, the loaded and meaningless term used by the anti-gun lobby to refer to pretty much any gun which isn't a bolt action hunting rifle. I'm glad we have people like you to decide what constitutes a sufficient weapon for the little people like me to own. It's naive to think a law is going to make a difference in your safety anyway, and small-minded to attempt to outlaw potential instead of actual misbehavior.
I have no doubt that you are just trying to improve your and my society. So is everybody. If you were able to manage to do so without resorting to forcable coersion of lawful people, I would appreciate it. This applies to both liberals and conservatives these days, so I'm not picking sides: I generally can't stand either one and find it at least a satisfying irony that the two sides which hate each other so much are really the same: they just differ in their own particular zealotry and agenda which they wish to universally impose. There's really nobody left who remembers the point of the US was originally to allow people to find their own way minimally hindered, so long as they didn't interfere with others doing the same.
Why is it always the seemingly most liberal places that seem to be so conservative on certain issues?
Modern "liberalism" is rife with such things, but it's not often it occurs to them to be bothered by it. For example everybody supports a women's right to choose to have an abortion, but nobody supports her right to defend herself with a weapon. Not a perfect analogy, but the point is far left liberals (who aren't really liberals anymore in the classic sense) generally only like freedom when it suits their controlling agenda.
Man, I knew this poor guy would get lambasted for suggesting that poor Brazilians probably weren't going to spend their time hacking an OS. Come on, you know he's right. Note that the Media Lab didn't say much about it actually being easy to use or allowing people to do certain things. They were more concerned with source access. That's an absurd priority, and it should be obvious. So let's drop the self-righteous indulgence of our own politics and admit the truth:
A) Nobody owes you the inner workings of anything. Does Boeing owe a schematic to everybody who wants one just because 1 out of 1 million of its users might have an interest in self learning about aerospace? Furthermore, would your primary concern when choosing an airplane be open schematics, or its performance as an airplane? Open source has its place, but let's not become simplistic zealots about it.
B) Having the source code is nice, but to weigh that as the primary reason for choosing an OS is pure idealogy. The only important thing is that Brazilians are maximally empowered by the computers, not that the OS chosen fits our political assumptions. Empowered in this case probably means at a user level, not a hacking level. If MacOS X can be shown to be easier to use for their target audience and needs than Linux, the extra money might be worth it. If Linux is the best for the users, then even better.
The guy's original analogy was flawed, yes, but there is enough truth to it that writing him off with smug platitudes about the Future of the Children is really ridiculous.
Listening to the Media Lab's opinion on an accessible OS for lay people is like asking NASA for advice on bicycles. How's that for a bad analogy?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm surprised nobody on the engineering team pointed out that everything's a power of two if you don't get all mystical and shit about integer exponents. Nice to know we can't even compete in manufacturing against a company run by people who make crucial engineering decisions based on numerology.
Agreed. I found that the better article, as well. Especially interesting was this bit:
Q: Cell has 8 embedded "SPE" CPU cores. What is the basis for this number?
A: Because it's a power of two, that's all there is to it. It's an aesthetic. In the world of computers, the power of two is the fundamental principle - there's no other way. Actually, in the course of development, there's this one occasion when we had an all-night, intense discussion in a U.S. hotel. The IBM team proposed to make it six. But my answer was simple - "the power of two." As a result of insisting on this aesthetic, the chip size ended up being 221mm2, which actually was not desirable for manufacturing.
Blogs are changing the world, but let's not assume it's for the better. The things that make a blog popular are exactly THE SAME THINGS THAT MAKE A MAJOR MEDIA OUTLET POPULAR. The most read blogs are the ones that trade integrity for sensation, and talk to the lowest common denominator. And the idea that it's an enabler of the masses is a joke. People don't have any more time to listen to bloggers than they had to listen to corporate TV or radio. So only a select few bloggers do, and even can, rise to the top to have any significant impact. (And then, of course, they become corporate.)
There is a certain "physics" to all of this, and the only thing we've changed are the names and the channels. The same fundamental properties are always at work, though. You can't change certain aspects of the way people get information from other people.
Just because a billion people COULD read what you wrote on the net is irrelevent. When the billion people on the internet are also contributing a billion of their own blogs, it's not so compelling anymore. What will come from this situation is the same solution that has arisen from EVERY other new form of media that has ever been invented: a corporatization will emerge to promote and profit from the best of what is out there.
I agree with a lot of what you said, but part of my original point was that the second one of the grassroots people starts to catch on, they become corporate. This mixing between the two worlds seems to be one of the dominant mechanisms for producing corporate media, in fact. My guess is that relatively few people are as manufactured as Britney. Look at Dave Mathews, for example. He was out there doing his thing for a long time before getting picked up. Either you acknowledge that he is still worthwhile now that he's working for he corporations, or that he never was because he was willing to "sell out". Everybody comes from nowhere, which is why I find this idea of "corporate" media so specious. The problem, if anything, is not the corporations but the masses to whom they market. The corporations are just a reflection of us, and maybe that's what people hate the most.
This is supposed to be "citizens media" finally being recognized for the inexorable power it is, huh? Now we'll finally hear from "real people"? So, I suppose the DJs doing their shows before weren't citizens. But will we all of a sudden want to listen to those same DJs were they to put their schtick on an MP3 and accept no pay? Arguably not, but the podcasting cheerleaders seem to think that we'll certainly want to hear from some people with no training or prior interest in broadcasting. Yeah, that makes sense.
This is only considered a big deal by those folks who are so politically overcharged with their own bullshit that they buy into the notion of "corporations" vs. "us", as if corporations are somehow staffed by evil robots and the only real people are living in San Francisco working for software startups.
My prediction: to the extent podcasting becomes successful, it will begin to approximate the media it supposedly replaces. Just look at the blogs: the most popular ones are now owned by corporations, and are essentially traditional media outlets.
I did get to that page. The important stats to look at are the top 100 data. The top 10 data have an inherent nonlinearity that is very decieving. By measuring how often the results were predominantly one or the other, you take small differences and amplify them greatly. For example, say I had a coin which was slightly more likely to have heads than tails, such that you might see 550 heads in 1000 tosses. Not a huge bias. However, if I did an experiment where I took groups of 100 tosses, and counted how many of them contained more heads then tails, I might find that this were the case 98% of the time. This would make the coin seem highly biased, and this is sort of what's happening in this guy's experiment.
As they say, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. Even people who know what they're doing often make wrong conclusions. This guy's about to start a holy war and he clearly is not well versed in statistical studies.
I'm not sure where you get your statistics, but the Boeings appear to have half the fatal accident rate according to what I've seen, with a few exceptions. Here are fatal accident rates per Million flights:
Airbus A300 1.13
Airbus A310 1.85
Airbus A319/21 0.67
Boeing 727 0.66
Boeing 737 0.62
Boeing 747 1.62
Boeing 757 0.56
Boeing 767 0.46
Now, if you're going to say "Well, the 747 is bigger than the A310 so really it has more fatalities" let me just you a question: When you're taking a flight, do you care about your chances of dying on that flight, or your chances of dying divided by the number of other people alongside you?
More airports is actually the most intelligent solution, by far. If it weren't for the rampant NIMBYism everywhere, helped along by our huge surfeit of lawyers, that's what we'd do.
Not my point. I'd argue that if you don't like something about something that's free, it's still fair to complain about it, even if you can't change it yourself. The person who created it can either ignore you or take it as a suggestion to implement. As long as your critique is truly constructive, there's never any gain in stifling it. People who say shit like "don't complain, it's free" are just taking an opportunity to be purely self-righteous.
That people are calling Rhapsody a failure is ridiculous. They've got 1M subscribers, which I believe is more than any other service. Here's a hint to some of you: just because you personally don't like something doesn't mean it's fair to declare it an objective failure without valid reason. For example, some of you are self-absorbed gasbags who can't see past your own perspective to fathom how anything you dislike could possibly have even a modicum of value; I don't like you because of that, but that doesn't mean you're not successful at what you do.
Same goes for Microsoft or non-OSS, etc. This place is quite the revival tent, sometimes. It's funny how most people here smugly mock religious people, but there's more religion here than on http://www.orm.cc/.
Excellent point. However, to go one step further, I can't wait until the day people quit even suggesting that blogs compete with standard media outlets. They don't. This whole frenzy about blogs is sort of like back when people thought we'd buy our groceries on the net and all the malls in the world would be empty by 2004. Blogs are great, but they are something new and different, not a replacement to professionals who actually have resources other than e-mail and a convenient disregard for standards.
What a fucking useless comment. Let's just stipulate the whole "as soon as you pay for this..." comments for the rest of eternity.
The guy had a valid point, and free or not, his constructive criticism should be welcome here. Are you suggesting anything that's free should be exempt from critique and standards? Like, say, OSS?
Well, I agree with what you said. If it turned out that MSN is stackng the deck explicitly in favor of IIS, that's fairly aggregious. Maybe not illegal, but pretty sorry nonetheless.
I was just pointing out that we have no more reason to suspect MSN of server bias than any of the other engines based on this guy's data, so far. Just by looking at the data, you can tell that there is nothing of statistical significance to the "discrepencies".
Anyway, I'm not saying MSN isn't doing what people allege, I'm just saying the original article provides no compelling support for or against.
Thanks for the link to the original. However, now I'm even more convinced it's nothing! Look at the variation between the four engines: the MSN results actually don't stand out, even though they are the lowest for Apache. For example, there is more difference between Google and Teoma than between Google and MSN. So, are we going to accuse the other search engines of manipulation, too? They exhibit the same level of variation from the apparently unquestionable Google reference.
He said that the distibution of servers from Google's results matched those published by Netcraft
Good point; I didn't catch that in my first reading. Having said that, to be devil's advocate, there's no reason why Google's rankings *should* correlate with the server market share, so the Netcraft correlation really isn't very meaningful. It wouldn't be surprising, for example, if free servers were underrepresented because they tend to be used by low quality sites trying to save money (e.g. spam sites). Google could be biased towards Apache such that it just happens to bring the rankings back up near the existing market shares. It *looks* very coincidental because 68% seems very close to %70. But in the context, it's really not, since MSN has Apache at 63%. So we're talking a perturbation of 2% versus 7%, which isn't such a huge difference.
A perl script was used to perform searches against Google and MSN and scrape the results...
Where does it say anything about other engines?
This is pretty ridiculous. There is no way to account for the million other variables that could confound this, such as:
.org) and use of IIS, and MSN is discriminating for or against that other, correlated variable.
1) Maybe it is Google discriminating *against* IIS, not Microsoft for.
2) Maybe there is a correlation between things like website type (i.e. corporate vs.
Yeah, great point out, given that the author also acknowledged that he answered his own question. Maybe you've got another one for your list...
Probably nobody will read this, due to my prior offense of posting something politically incorrect and getting bad karma (a nice feature of /. is that it self corrects for any diversity of opinion) but the answer to your question is that you can sample a periodic signal at a total aggregate rate which is much higher than the bandwidth of any individual component by sampling over many periods. For example, electro-optical samplers grab small measurements at slightly different offsets to the period, and after a while you get a picture of the signal. That's why all oscilloscopes above a certain bandwidth (a few hundred MHz, I think) are all sampling oscilloscopes.
I'm still on the fence about this myself. One difference is that cars operate in a common public space. On the other hand, somebody who has been threatened and who feels the need to have a gun available in their home probably shouldn't have to wait six weeks for a course to put something in their own house. Maybe a license should be required to carry or use a gun outside one's property.
I wonder, how much force would it take to make it not worth it? I would think a fairly impressive amount (i.e. tanks, or tens of thousands of people with machine guns)
Exactly, thousands of people with guns. That's the whole point of the second amendment. It makes it really hard to get away with anything horrible, like internment of a large population.
In the end, military operations always come down to people. In the case of the government, most likely local police or federal agents (most folks in our military would be unwilling to engage citizens, one of the reasons the feds like to have goons like the ATF). The second amendment is meaningless unless citizens have similar firepower to the people the government would use. A government that's wary of its citizens as a whole is probably a good thing. It seems ludicrous now, I know. But if, in the distant future, it ever looks like it might not be so ludicrous, there will be no way to get our guns back then if we give them up now.
Finally, here's another argument: some people don't like the idea of having to rely on the government for their protection, or have reason to expect little service in that regard. So, if the police deem it neccesary to have assault rifles to protect honest citizens, then honest citizens should be allowed to have them if they so choose to protect themselves.
Well said. You make a very good argument. Obviously, I don't think people should have nukes. Nukes should never stray from governments. What makes assault rifles fundamentally different is that they're out there. So, gun laws banning them just disarm honest citizens. I think that's the part of "our side" that "your side" doesn't really understand. If I could magically take all guns away, I probably would. But there's something wrong with a government that's afraid of it's honest citizens owning something dangerous. It's frustrating to see honest people lose rights over the naive feel-good idea that gun laws work. If someone doesn't care about murder laws, why the heck would they care about gun laws? Every gun crime is done in violation of multiple gun laws. The kids at Columbine broke dozens. Anyway, it's obviously easier for politicians to get self-righteous about the guns than actually solve the underlying causes of violence, which are complex and expensive to fix. So I think NRA-types are justifiably pissed about the whole thing. They are losing something dear to them solely for politcal capital of small minded politicians.
Finally, the whole overthrow the government thing is still valid! You don't need to be able to win, you just need to be able to resist with enough force to make it not worth it. The first thing every tyrant does is disarm the citizens. One of the first things the Nazis did was disarm the Jews.
Well, then try to get a carry permit in certain cities in California.
Well said, except for you first paragraph being a prime example of what you chastice. You demonstrate my point by suggesting that it's ok to own a handgun but not an "assault" rifle, the loaded and meaningless term used by the anti-gun lobby to refer to pretty much any gun which isn't a bolt action hunting rifle. I'm glad we have people like you to decide what constitutes a sufficient weapon for the little people like me to own. It's naive to think a law is going to make a difference in your safety anyway, and small-minded to attempt to outlaw potential instead of actual misbehavior.
I have no doubt that you are just trying to improve your and my society. So is everybody. If you were able to manage to do so without resorting to forcable coersion of lawful people, I would appreciate it. This applies to both liberals and conservatives these days, so I'm not picking sides: I generally can't stand either one and find it at least a satisfying irony that the two sides which hate each other so much are really the same: they just differ in their own particular zealotry and agenda which they wish to universally impose. There's really nobody left who remembers the point of the US was originally to allow people to find their own way minimally hindered, so long as they didn't interfere with others doing the same.
Modern "liberalism" is rife with such things, but it's not often it occurs to them to be bothered by it. For example everybody supports a women's right to choose to have an abortion, but nobody supports her right to defend herself with a weapon. Not a perfect analogy, but the point is far left liberals (who aren't really liberals anymore in the classic sense) generally only like freedom when it suits their controlling agenda.
Man, I knew this poor guy would get lambasted for suggesting that poor Brazilians probably weren't going to spend their time hacking an OS. Come on, you know he's right. Note that the Media Lab didn't say much about it actually being easy to use or allowing people to do certain things. They were more concerned with source access. That's an absurd priority, and it should be obvious. So let's drop the self-righteous indulgence of our own politics and admit the truth:
A) Nobody owes you the inner workings of anything. Does Boeing owe a schematic to everybody who wants one just because 1 out of 1 million of its users might have an interest in self learning about aerospace? Furthermore, would your primary concern when choosing an airplane be open schematics, or its performance as an airplane? Open source has its place, but let's not become simplistic zealots about it.
B) Having the source code is nice, but to weigh that as the primary reason for choosing an OS is pure idealogy. The only important thing is that Brazilians are maximally empowered by the computers, not that the OS chosen fits our political assumptions. Empowered in this case probably means at a user level, not a hacking level. If MacOS X can be shown to be easier to use for their target audience and needs than Linux, the extra money might be worth it. If Linux is the best for the users, then even better.
The guy's original analogy was flawed, yes, but there is enough truth to it that writing him off with smug platitudes about the Future of the Children is really ridiculous.
Listening to the Media Lab's opinion on an accessible OS for lay people is like asking NASA for advice on bicycles. How's that for a bad analogy?
-Jonathan