Is Kazaa distribution part of the answer? (was: Python and p2p)

[Carlos Ribeiro]

On Thursday 06 February 2003 11:26 am, Cameron Laird wrote:
> My feathers are ruffled.  I thought what I just learned
> (and my thanks go to Carlos for his ethnologic descrip-
> tions) was that what's posted to mailing lists and clp
> is invisible to the target audience.  Somebody wants
> something, but I'm having trouble understanding what it
> is.

In poor countries, there are many young people with lots of potential that 
have little or no chances to learn more. Of course, there are big 
universities and research centers - at my home city, I had some classes 
taught by PhDs from the MIT and Berkeley, to give an example - but the vast 
majority of the country is not like this.

Since moving to a smaller city (but still quite big), I've been amazed to see 
how curious people are. Lots of teenagers move from the smaller cities around 
to study here, and they have very limited knowledge but lots of curiosity. 
Reaching these people and teaching them how to find great stuff is a worthy 
goal in itself. But their knowledge of english is limited, and most of them 
end up talking between themselves on chat rooms, or trading pirate CDROMs 
with the 'latest and greatest' software as advertised in magazines (the few 
ones that they can afford to find).

As a side note, it's incredible when you discover how many of them have 
actually 'reinvented the wheel' - in other words, implemented something from 
the scratch, in some cases using outdated tools, but without any formal 
knowledge about the actual techniques. I've seen it literally dozens of 
times. Their ingenuity and resourcefullness is really amazing.


Carlos Ribeiro
cribeiro at mail.inet.com.br