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Your right of course, I must be getting old and doddery.

This entire country has recently been through a massive disinformation campaign (WMD's anyone?), most people should be more suspicious of an action of this kind, especially so close to national elections.

I'd wager that in a few months the Indymedia 'investigation' will quietly end with no charges being filed and no explainations given.

Unfortunately for whoever is coordinating this latest governmenteffort, dissent and public disbelief in Official Government Lies has pread far beyond the underground radical fringe. Heck, you can buy Fahrenheit 9/11 at WALMART... where they sell guns and everything.

If the Indymedia people are worth their salt as activists, they'll be able to parlay this government action into increased visibility and increased participation in their efforts.

Who's Billy DeBeck, you ask? Why, just the guy who created the comic strip character Barney Google (you know, the guy with the "goo-goo-googly eyes"?!) and King Features Syndicate for distributing the cartoon for the past EIGHTY-FIVE YEARS (which, by the way, doesn't predate Mr. Kastner but which DOES predate the coining of the word "googol" by at least a decade.)

It's this kind of frivolous abuse of the courts that keeps real and legitimate cases that might bring about real reforms and improvements from being effective (or even successful.)

If it was one of the many high level institutions that Microsoft has given access to, then Microsoft likely has a method to track the leaked code back to the source.

Like Tom Clancy's Canary Trap, for example.

So why don't you hear a lot of people complaining that their airline or credit card company customer reps can't talk good American? Because there are plenty of well-educated Indians who speak fluent western English. All they need is a little practice on their idioms and pronunciation, and you can't tell them from a native of Duluth. Not over the phone anyway.

So it's perfectly possible to run an operation out of Bangalore or Dehli without communication problems. And yet you hear all these horror stories. I have a few myself: I subscribe to techwr-l, and we often get lame questions from Indian writers, usually basic grammatical stuff even a American 4th grader or a Slashdot editor would know.

My inference is that the companies driving the offshoring trend aren't satisified with the pay differential between San Jose and Bangalore. So they don't hire people with degrees from India's universities or engineering schools. (Which produce a lot of good people -- I've worked with some of them.) They hire folks whose educational achievements culminated in one of those "learn programming in 2 weeks" schools. Their English is hard to follow, not because of their accents, but because its one of the highly-localized English dialects that Indians use amongst themselves.

Here's another horror story. If you're a tech writer in the San Francisco Bay area, you've noticed a lot of headhunters trying to fill a very strange job in San Ramon. What's in San Ramon? A bunch of engineering outfits that decided that rents in Silicon Valley were too high -- never mind a limited local talent pool, if people want to keep their jobs, they'll commute or move. One of these outfits is the development arm of what used to be Pacific Bell, now a nameless subsidiary of SBC.

You need massive databases to run an RBOC, and this one has fallen way behind on database development. People complain of billing errors and outdated listings. There's a hair salon in San Rafael that can't get SBC to put its Yellow Pages listing in the proper category -- for two years running it's been listed under "Massage". Which sounds funny, until you consider the kind of lowlifes who respond to a massage ad for "Curl Up With Kelly".

So these guys in San Ramon are scrambling to update the software. They need a tech writer who can document their work. Said writer needs to be able to read source code in half a dozen languages, including the venerable Revelation Basic. Oh yes, and the writer has to work for $25/hour.

Well, I have the skills and I need the work. But that's hardly a reasonable wage, especially considering the two-hour commute. (It's a short term contract, so relocation is not practical.) I'd be better off working at the Starbucks down the street.

When I pointed out the absurdity of offering entry-level pay for a job requiring advanced skills, I was told that all the costs were measured against the alternative of moving the whole operation to India. Which is total nonsense. I'm sure there are plenty of Indian operations that could engineer a fancy database from scratch, and do a good job very cheaply. But SBC doesn't even want to spend that much money. They want to continue hacking 20-year-old code running on legacy platforms. Do they think that India is swarming with experts on the PICK database system?

The whole offshoring thing is just the latest development in a nasty long-term trend. Even before the dotcom bubble burst, Wall Street was dominated more and more by numbers dweebs, people who have no understanding of the industries and businesses they're investing in, and have an idiotic obssession with the bottom line. They hate costs more than anything. Even if you're turning a

A Cessna 172!

You know, after eating at McDonalds, I think I would want to go listen to the song Constipation Blues, by Screamin' Jay Hawkins... Too bad it's not yet offered on the iTunes Music Store. :^)

Does anyone else find it strange that Apple and McDonalds sell Big Macs (albeit in different form factors), and have announced a deal together?

huh ???
where the hell did you find that information ?
The shuttle uses 5 identical IBM special purpose-built computers (currently, they are AP-101S).
These things are all but intel-based machines.
here you will find more info on those machines.

Simply put, they are based on the IBM-360 architecture, and where programmed in a language called HAL/S (High-Order Assembly Language / Shuttle).

Do some research before saying stupid things, pal !