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To: elmatador who wrote (60290)	2/11/2005 11:57:25 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

<Amadeu is a crusader of a kind, having written a book entitled "Digital Exclusion: Misery in the Information Era", which argues that technology broadens the gap between the wealthy (the digitally enabled) and the needy (the digital paupers). > Of course technology broadens the gap between the wealthy and the poor. So does anything which the intelligent can use and the unintelligent can't. You can give chimpanzees cars, computers, tape measures, theodolites, cellphones and free medical care, but they will still be poor, because they don't know how to use the tools they are given. They can't be educated to use them. Similarly, like it or not, intelligence measured by IQ in humans runs from zero to about 200 or so. Those at the bottom of the heap are unable to use the tools, especially the abstract ones such as third order partial differential equations, or even simpler ones such as discounted cash flow analysis, or even simple arithmetic such as working out change from a purchase. The gap cannot be closed. It's a fact of life. The rich can also be reduced to poverty, and that will reduce the gap, but the poor can't be made rich. Stealing the property, intellectual or otherwise, from the creative and productive, will not make the poor rich. On the contrary. It will reduce their wealth further. The productive and creative will stop producing. People won't study for decades to have the intellectual property they develop stolen from them, leaving them no better off than the average, lazy, unintelligent layabout who got the booze and the girls while the impoverished studious were studying. Mqurice