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Scientists now have a clear image of the God of the Whopper galaxy.

Well, the thing is: it's just because fossil-based oil was so cheap that the engines evolved that way. But that's history: we cannot change it. I'm sure they can be tuned to work on other fuels.

I don't know why, but governments seem to remove the fiscal advantages of bio-fuels. In Germany they plan to remove the tax-advantages on biofuels. Great way to encourage adoption! NOT!

That's just plain bulldoody. In France they have competition because of regulation (called Local Loop Unbundling) and there are HUNDREDS of ISPs, some of whom are doing so well that they are now building their own fiber networks with NO tax money. They are paying approximately 40 bucks per month for a broadband connection at lightning and SYNCHRONOUS speeds, and included with the broadband subscription is Voip telephony, 99 channels of IPTV, and WiFi.

No. I'm saying I shouldn't have to.
So, by that same logic, you would expect to be able to turn on the Hardcore Porn channel and not have anything offensive on it. You are responsible for choosing what you watch and what you don't; and by extension what your children watch or don't. If you don't like what a show is about, change the channel, that is what choice is about. Trying to force everything to be kid friendly is limiting choice.

Are you too incompetent to change the channel to Showtime when you want porn?
Are you too incompetent to change the channel when you don't want to see it? That ad hominem fallacy works both ways, but what you are pushing for is going to take away that choice from me. As it is, the FCC is looking to extend it's censorship on to cable. It won't be too long before I can't change the channel to porn. On the other hand, kid friendly content will always be around. The Disney channel isn't going to suddenly start showing Snow White getting it on with the seven dwarves.

Holy shit! I didn't realize that wanting some channels to be free of "indecency" was so indecent!
It's not, but wanting all channels free of indecency is. And allowing a bunch of bureaucrats to arbitrarily make up rules about what is indecent and what is not, is asking for exactly that.

What's wrong with letting you have your channels and my child having hers?
Again, there is no problem with this, but this is not what the FCC is trying to do. The FCC wants to foist it's ideas of decency on every channel. On the other hand, without the FCC, yes there would be channels with hardcore porn; however, children's programming wouldn't disappear. For a good example, look at the internet. I can find just about any type of pornography to titillate me, and you can find plenty of children's content. Lack of regulation did not turn it into some adult content ridden hell-hole.

Do you think that ALL channels should be free of any form of decency standards?
Sort of. I think they should be free from government mandated standards; however, they should at least be honest about what their content is (which could be mandated, TV ratings are a good idea). Additionally, channels will self-censor. Disney Channel is not going to show Princesses Gone Wild, just because the government is no longer breathing down their necks. They know what their customer base is, and will continue to pander to it.

Do you want to see Big-Bird's balls?
Might be a funny parody, but not really my thing, thanks.

First, the article is the NJIT press release, with essentially the same text and pictures.

Second, this is yet another of those overhyped "minor advance in materials science" articles. The abstract for the technical article says only "The results indicate that C60 decorated SWCNTs are promising additives for performance enhancement of polymer photovoltaic cells." There's no mention of "paintable solar cells".

"Paintable solar cells" have been talked up before (they were mentioned on Slashdot two years ago) but nobody has actually made that work. There's this fantasy that you somehow spray something on your roof and get power out. But it's not likely to work.

Some guy at the University of Toronto has been hping this for several years now. He got quite a bit of press in 2005. But his actual cells were, according to Business Week, 3 orders of magnitude worse than existing technology, were more expensive to make, and had a limited lifetime.

I was much more impressed when I went to a talk by Mark Pinto, the VP of Applied Materials' solar unit. He spoke for an hour and a half, and never mentioned "eco" or "green". He's a manufacturing exec, and he sees this as a manufacturing cost problem. They know what to do; they just need to do it bigger, faster, and cheaper. Which is what Applied Materials does, very successfully, for ICs and flat panel displays. He has charts showing that in high-sun areas like southern Spain, solar power can now be cheaper than existing electricity sources. So they're building a big solar panel plant there. As the materials improve, they'll convert to new materials and processes, just like they do for ICs. And as with ICs and flat panel displays, they expect to follow the cost curve down.

Their existing generation of solar panel fab is derived from their flat panel display fab equipment, but they expect that, over time, those technologies will diverge. They'd like a roll-to-roll solar cell process, and bought a company with one that sort of works, but if it doesn't, they think they can do OK with something that works like a huge wafer fab, with each wafer covering five square meters.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Cell+phones+f or+elderly
http://cellphones.about.com/od/topcellphones/tp/ce ll_senior.htm
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_33 /b3947040_mz006.htm
http://www.engadget.com/2004/07/28/lgs-cellphone-f or-the-elderly/
All phones and leads on phones with exactly what you require. And, no foreign import issues.
"Ocham's Razor essentially states that all things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually correct."

> Vista is actually selling quite well
No, Vista is being pre-installed on new computers.
Vista is not selling well, people do not want it, and
companies are being told to stay away from it*

> and many people I know are using it without any complaints.
Many people I know are switching to Ubuntu. See how that statement works?

> Why are the good points about Vista never mentioned on Slashdot?
Um because most of the people that come here just see history repeating
itself.

[*]
http://www.tech.co.uk/computing/software/operating -systems/features/why-nobody-wants-windows-vista
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov 2006/tc20061129_739121.htm
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37 721

I cannot help but to think this is an attempt to keep Whole Foods from effectively competing with WalMart. If Whole Foods were to acquire WildOats they might actually become 6 billion dollar company, up from the 5.7 billion dollar company they are today. How will 200 billion dollar WalMart compete? It just isn't fair!

You should probably read The Innovator's Dilemma.
Or maybe just read about the concepts presented in the book.

Remember, these ratings are used by advertisers to determine on which site to put their ads.

That the imbalance is exacerbated by migrant workers is definitely a possibility (of course, if the male/female statistics are based on the number of births in those M.E. countries, than it's probably unrelated), however, I think that leads to the question of "where are the migrant workers coming from, and what are their homes' sex ratios like?"

Things are definitely not any better in Asia. Whether as a result of sex-selection abortions, infanticide, disease / selective access to medical care, or some other reason, the male/female ratios in Asia are even further off than in the Middle East. (There are a lot of references on this, because it's obviously a big problem to any one in India...here's one.)

So if Oman, Saudi Arabia, and other M.E. countries are "male heavy" as a result of migrant workers (which, again, is only true if you're looking at adult statistics, which I'm not sure is the case) than that means the male/female ratio in whatever areas these workers are coming from -- presumably Asia -- even more dire, since their absence is serving to cover up the problem.

Kinda off topic, but in response to your question:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_08 /b3871047.htm

"J.D. Power & Associates Initial Quality Survey taken last year, the H2 ranked near the bottom. The biggest gripe: While no one bought a Hummer for the sake of its thrifty gas mileage, its 11 to 13 miles per gallon was even worse than expected."

Portelligent estimates that the cost of the materials used in the iPhone add up to about $200 for the 4-gigabyte version, which sells for $499 and about $220 for the 8-gigabyte version, which sells for $599. Their estimate doesn't include costs of final assembly, but it does give some insight into the gross margin on the device. Historically Apple's gross margins have run ball park of 50% plus or minus a few points. "We had taken a speculative stab at what the costs would be back in January, when the phone was first announced and we were pretty close to the mark,"

"Customer service, security, and quality are at best an afterthought at Apple."

Curious, Business Week would seem to differ, at least on the customer service ranking.

I'm just wondering, how many iPods do they need to sell before it's "more than a happy accident"?

SteveM

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070628-cryp tography-company-develops-chip-to-lock-out-third-p arty-ink-jet-cartridges.html
Cryptography Research Inc are also working on blu-ray BD+, the security on new blu-ray discs that will have features like:

1: expiring discs. so the media you own will need continued licence renewals to enable you to use it.
2: the ability for studios to remote disable drives permanently if yours or a line is found to be hacked/venerable.
3. usage reports to the studios of your hardware, including your location and serial number used in the fight against piracy.

http://yahoo.businessweek.com/technology/content/m ay2006/tc20060526_680075.htm
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070620-blu- ray-content-protection-agency-certifies-bd.html

Totally agree with you, this is a PR stunt by ProgrammersGuild. Read the following: "A handful of groups do oppose more green cards for the highly educated. Kim Berry, president of the 1,500-member Programmers' Guild, argues that giving green cards to the hundreds of thousands of people in the backlog will displace Americans and drag down wage levels. He points out that employment in the tech sector has been largely stagnant since 2000, adding only a net 262,700 jobs since then to bring the total to 3.7 million. Adding in another 315,000 people from the green-card queue would flood the market with labor, he says, with many of the newcomers willing to work for less. "For a young programmer coming from India, a $40,000 salary might be fine," says Berry. "But it's not going to be enough for an American trying to raise a family in San Jose." from http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/conten t/jun2007/db20070620_915353.htm?campaign_id=rss_da ily The Programmers' Guild's job is to try to keep as many Americans employed in these obsolete positions even though, these jobs are being outsourced already. Yeah this is definitely a way to keep efficiency high. Which is why Capitalism works. Notice how they say the Law firm does not talk about salary, well to meet PERM requirements, the employee's salary needs to meet 100% of the prevailing wage. http://www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/wages.cfm So go take your propaganda elsewhere ProgrammersGuild.

Stop. Just - stop.

China is not a communist nation. Communism is a Marxist system of economics and government in which the state owns the goods and means of production and (in theory) distributes the goods equally to all people.

Starting with Deng in 1976, the economic reforms pushed through the Chinese state have transformed it into a authoritarian capitalist society. There is no communism, and little socialism left. These are not little Soviet robots trying to insert sleeper cells so they can rise up and conquer us with their ideograms. The Chinese people are going through their version of our Industrial Revolution, except with the firm hand of government directing it (as much as they are able). 70% of the Chinese GDP is private, not state-owned.

There is/was a political slogan in China concerning those economic reforms: "Mao gave us liberation -- Deng gave us food."

You throw the words Marxism-Leninism and Communism around pretty carelessly. Marx proscribed a very specific version of economics and government (and the path to achieve those) that was eventually *rejected* by Mao. A major reason of this rejection is that Marx saw the proletarian revolution as being primarily focused on the industrial workers in the cities (which was the case in Russia). China had a much more agrarian society, and the Chinese had to revise the Marxist ideology to focus on the peasants. Mao was only able to win the Chinese Civil War because he had the support of the peasantry.

(I would also like to point out that my views on what China is and is not do not come from journalists who want to play armchair general - in addition to reading, I spend a lot of time with Chinese immigrants and first and second generation Chinese-Americans. I've spoken with former Communist Party members about politics and with Chinese intellectuals about economics.)

As for the further materials you referenced: Bill Gertz reports for the Washington Times (a conservative newspaper) and FOX News. So, I'd take his opinions (particularly his 2005 WT article "The Chinese Dragon Awakens") with a grain of salt. Your bias is showing.

(FULL DISCLOSURE: My company has a branch office in Beijing. I have studied Chinese modern history and philosophy. I am currently studying Mandarin. I do not give in to fear mongering that America has to have an enemy and that all countries that do not pander to us but instead actively look out for their own self-interests are inherently evil.)

Good Reference Material:
China: A Century of Revolution (Hard to come by, though)

AT&T is not AT&T now, because the name was sold to an abusive west coast telephone company named SBC.

My understanding is that everything else of value in the original AT&T was sold piece-by-piece, and SBC bought mostly just the name. My understanding is that the SBC trademark was worse than useless because the company is so abusive. So, the managers bought another name.

Apparently, for $16 Billion SBC got AT&T's VOIP customers, and the AT&T name.

AT&T's VOIP customers were Sheila and Gerald Funk, who have since moved to Elbonia. Wait... That last sentence my contain an error.

So, what we are seeing is SBC mismanagement under a new name. Soon just saying the name AT&T will cause people to become upset.

These busts are nothing compared to the container loads full of pirated CD's, DVD's, cosmetics, toys, bikes, medicine, clothing, batteries, cameras, and electronics coming in from China. The goods coming in from China look identical to the legitimate item, except that sometimes the batteries explode due to defects in cloning the original and the medicine, costmetics, and food sometimes kill and/or poison. If our government fails to contain China, the US will become to China what England was to the 13 Colonies. If the RIAA really wants to stop mass piracy and copyright violations, they should start with the container ships and the Walmart supply chains.

P.S. - Take my advice, don't feed the wheat-gluten from China to your pets.

This sort of thing is the reason why I have retained a patent lawyer who, the day the "first to file" change is passed into law, will put in an application for a business method patent. The brief, non-legalese version basically covers the business model of suing over patents which the owning company does not themselves utilize. (That way, I can sue into oblivion any business attempting craziness like this.)

Naturally, anyone attempting to argue whether I practice my own patent may find themselves falling into a logical paradox, as my patent itself implies I cannot practice my patent.

Here's a thought in return: I don't care if your ISP traffic shapes your traffic...

Would that not be prevented in most Net Neutrality proposals?

Possibly. I must admit I've not been following the proposed legislation. But if so, it's the proposals that are broken and not the principle of Net Neutrality.

I think we share the viewpoints on these concerns. The difference is in the solution, not the question of whether the problem exists.

I think we agree a problem exists. I'm not sure we see the same problem, however. I did a bit of reading up on this, since this discussion. The whole Network Neutrality issue seems to have kicked off with an interview SBC CEO Edward Whitacre gave to business week. This is the offending section:

How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google (GOOG ), MSN, Vonage, and others?

How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?

As you see, he's not talking about traffic shaping, and he's not talking about victimising specific sites. He's talking about making people pay to use his pipes. "People" probably doesn't mean you and me directly, but it's only a matter of time once the practice is accepted before it means the ISPs. And if they have to pay a surcharge to use Ed's pipes then they have to pass it on to us. So he may be talking about Google and Vonage, but what he means (reading between the lines) is that he wants to tax everyone using the Internet.

And... I'm not an expert on US law, but I'm not sure that anti-competitive law would apply if they victimise everyone equally. They'd just be charging all the market would bear, surely. And they we could look forward to cross licencing deals between the big boys which would allow them to offer service at a lower price than the mom and pop ISPs that had to pay a surcharge to every penny ante cableco on the face of the globe, and that would just be "economies of scale" when it came to court. Eventually, there would be a handful of multinational service providers, and the content companies would finally achieve their dream of turning the Internet into Just Another TV Channel.

So, really, I'm not adverse to tightening anti-trust law, but I don't think it's going to offer any sort of protection here. And I don't think that protecting specific sites is going to help, because I don't think that's the plan. I think that's a bit of misdirection; what they want is to charge everyone.

Not particularly. Because they rely on semiconductors, they only scale as well as the fabs to build them. The problem has been that the solar industry uses plants that are at the end of their semiconductor chip fabricating life; thus they do not wield great efficiency due to small wafer sizes. They also suffer from the base challenges of dealing with silicon wafers (raw cost of wafers, dicing costs, etc.) The same cost problem exists with LEDs. It's interesting to note how GE is focused on cost of production in OLEDs rather than their efficiency on GE's Global Research Blog post. Following that analogy, it's not the 40% efficiency that will launch solar cells, it's 10% efficiency at 10% of today's cost (It's about cost/kWh).

Now, if we could only figure out some way for the oil companies to reap massive profits from such a scheme, I'm sure it would happen in no time.

You mean oil companies like BP and Royal Dutch Shell? ... two of the top 6 producers of solar cells?

I'd note that most oil companies do have lots of research into alternative (non-oil) energy. It's just hard to see in their financials because oil is so lucrative. The major one that realy gets criticized for its lack of investment in areas like solar is ExxonMobil - and the reason they don't is probably the same reason that Cisco doesn't tend to develop most of its revolutionary technology inside the company. XOM and CSCO both have tons of cash, tons of cash flow and a well-priced stock giving them the ability to simply buy a producer of new equipment if it becomes a valuable market. Why bother to spend tons of money on basic research when you can let the newcomers fight it out in the market and just buy the leader when the time is appropriate? As strange as it is, that's R&D economics at many large industry-leading corporations. It's "efficient outsourced innovation".

On the business possibilities, businessweek online has an interview with BillG about this very issue. I won't spoil the ending, but MS speculates it could be selling in the "low billions of dollars" in the things in a few years, though they only seem to know how to make it an information kiosk. At best it would be a "complimentary" computer to your office machine and, presumably, the computer hanging on your wall that sells you movies. There's your ecosystem.

It might bear mentioning, of course, that the iPhone is also a complimentary computing device, so we all seem to be rowing in the same direction.

Not anymore. "[A] provision of the 1992 Cable Acts, says cable operators can no longer require subscribers to buy multitier packages of programming to get pay-per-view events and premium channels, such as as HBO, Starz, and Showtime."

Source: Businessweek http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov 2002/tc2002116_0167.htm

It doesn't look like a purse without the carrying case:
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/07/05/0524_metro laptop/image/slide4.jpg

It's not a purse, it's European!

And more pictures.

Heres a set of images from the actual article... http://images.businessweek.com/ss/07/05/0524_metro laptop/index_01.htm

Does it come with lipstick?

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/07/05/0524_metro laptop/image/intro.jpg

"but that's only after having bounced 50 related ideas off my coworkers. For some types of innovation, you may even need access to equipment and tools before you can develop the idea in the first place."

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/may20 07/id20070518_332210_page_2.htm

Buxton takes pains to distinguish sketches from prototypes, which are more detailed, more expensive, and more focused on testing or proving a single idea. If sketching is about asking questions, prototyping is about suggesting answers. Sketching takes place at the beginning of the development process, prototyping only later.

For an executive more comfortable with hard data, the value of these scraps of drawings, these glorified doodles, might not be obvious. But Buxton makes a case that could easily be expressed in a spreadsheet. Sketching is less expensive than prototyping, and far less expensive than trying to fix problems late in the development cycle.

Does that mean that companies shouldn't invest in prototypes? Of course not. But it does suggest that investing more money and resources up front to allow a small team of designers adequate time for product ideas will save significantly higher costs of trying to correct problems later in the game, when the production team has swelled to include as many as 50 engineers and marketers, and delays can cost millions.>>

On body armor... Israeli researchers at one company, ApNano Materials Inc. in New York, have shown off a breastplate of nanometals said to be five times as strong as steel. (source source)

One of the coolest thing I recall seeing - I forget if it was on the Military Channel or Discovery - was body armor made from a material (sorry forgot what it is/was might have been spider silk) that would act as a body of water and ripple off the impact of a bullet to reduce the point of entry thereby leaving the target (person wearing the armor) safe. I personally think we are maybe 10 years away from finding an impenetrable body armor solution. My wonders are, how much will it cost when it does come out. Sadly instead of attempting to assist military and LEO's, the makers will let greed get in the way.

Yeah, but according to a business week article, 1.847 billion of those chinese and indians won't buy your software, they'll just pirate it. So fuck it, let them write their own software. They can use however many bytes per character they want. Anyway, I miss plain ASCII. Much more elegant, and you can use char buffers as buffers for binary data without dicking around with lo-byte / hi-byte nonsense.

Actually you can already see this trend in many (if not most) universities. Just go to any of the graduate programs around the nation and you will see that the vast majority of students are foreign students. Many of them stay and pursue teaching or research positions. That is why an ever increasing number of faculty are European, Indian or Chinese (at least in the sciences and engineering). The academic world requires a certain personality to succeed -- one that seems unappealing compared to the glitzy lifestyle of Silicon Valley IPOs.

The GP's idea of the counter-intuitive notion of encouraging immigration to help the economy is nothing new. That's what America has been doing ever since it was founded. It's a pity that the xenophobic elements always dismiss any possibility that the Irish, Germans, Chinese, or any other immigration wave, could ever bring any good to outweight the short-term negative impact they may force upon our established way of life. For a modern example of where this open borders policy is working, Business Week has an article on how open immigration policy has propelled Spain as the best-performing major economy in Europe.

Link: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_21 /b4035066.htm?chan=search

It sounds like a reasonable goal, if they can first reach their earlier goal of having hybrids available for all models by 2012.... http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/apr2 006/gb20060403_308133.htm

Incidentally, I mentioned those articles -- here's my collection. Let's get them out there to help build our industry.

They range in subject matters that assist me, with the majority being security related.

http://www.nbc4.com/money/11588165/detail.html
http://www.nbc4.com/money/11588165/detail.html
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71032-0.html
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pag ename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Artic le&cid=1135552209280&call_pageid=971358637177
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM .20050704.gtkirwanjul4/BNStory/specialScienceandHe alth/
http://www.redorbit.com/news/display/?id=176198
http://www.livescience.com/scienceoffiction/060619 _hyperactive_bob.html
http://www.labour.gov.on.ca/english/es/factsheets/ fs_faq.html
http://www.e.govt.nz/policy/open-source/open-sourc e-legal
http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/securi ty/privacy/story/0,10801,108101,00.html
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?com mand=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=storage&article Id=9004274&taxonomyId=19&intsrc=kc_feat
http://www.canada.com/components/print.aspx?id=f6f 548f7-9dfd-49f4-9ff8-8ae8f4a2e2fd
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/apr 2006/tc20060417_996365.htm?campaign_id=bier_tca
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_37 /b4000401.htm?chan=tc&campaign_id=bier_tcst0
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1 781895,00.html
http://panko.cba.hawaii.edu/ssr/Mypapers/whatknow. htm

Incidentally, I mentioned those articles -- here's my collection. Let's get them out there to help build our industry.

They range in subject matters that assist me, with the majority being security related.

http://www.nbc4.com/money/11588165/detail.html
http://www.nbc4.com/money/11588165/detail.html
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71032-0.html
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pag ename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Artic le&cid=1135552209280&call_pageid=971358637177
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM .20050704.gtkirwanjul4/BNStory/specialScienceandHe alth/
http://www.redorbit.com/news/display/?id=176198
http://www.livescience.com/scienceoffiction/060619 _hyperactive_bob.html
http://www.labour.gov.on.ca/english/es/factsheets/ fs_faq.html
http://www.e.govt.nz/policy/open-source/open-sourc e-legal
http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/securi ty/privacy/story/0,10801,108101,00.html
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?com mand=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=storage&article Id=9004274&taxonomyId=19&intsrc=kc_feat
http://www.canada.com/components/print.aspx?id=f6f 548f7-9dfd-49f4-9ff8-8ae8f4a2e2fd
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/apr 2006/tc20060417_996365.htm?campaign_id=bier_tca
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_37 /b4000401.htm?chan=tc&campaign_id=bier_tcst0
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1 781895,00.html
http://panko.cba.hawaii.edu/ssr/Mypapers/whatknow. htm

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/may2 007/gb20070507_834900.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+i ndex_businessweek+exclusives

Points:

1. Strikes are possible against even mild economical measures
2. The program itself is not right-wing enough to overcome France's woes.

All I can say is that things have changed quite a bit from the 1980's. I was recently reading in the Pakistani press that Pakistan was placing an embargo on importing phones manufactured in India, and how that would increase the prices of telephones out there. Which, of course, let me wonder as to why the Pakistanis would be interested in importing those electrical bricks I remember from my childhood, those (cant remember the brand names) PSU-churned sets they used to hand out with every new line.

They weren't. They were talking about Nokia handsets.

Now, you might rightfully argue that Nokia, as a brand, isn't Indian, but look at it this way:- close to 25% of all the Nokia phones manufactured in India are exported. This in a country that's already the third largest market for Nokia.

In short, we've lost Indian brand-names, but have gained some world-class production capabilities.

How bad can the HRD funk up things? Well, there's some serious cause for optimism:- the PSU (public sector undertaking, for non-Indians) the article talks about, Semiconductor Complex, is owned by India's space agency, ISRO. Which may or may not mean much, but I wouldn't be too hasty in writing them off.

Just to follow up, according to this article, Blue Brain*, utilizing a 22.8 teraflop supercomputer, manages to simulate around 10,000 human neurons. I have no idea whether human neurons are significantly more complex than mouse neurons, or whether we just have more of them, but if the latter then maybe the 8000 isn't a typo after all?

* Previously mentioned on slashdot.

argue that corporations as a class gave support to any particular political movement is something that needs more rigorous research - and I haven't seen it so far in this case.

German history of the NSDAP is full of research about this. The NSDAP was funded by the German (and international) business world, full stop. And the NSDAP delivered in exchange what the corporations wanted: fear, submission, and slave labor.

I'm sure some bourgeois sons and daughters sponsored the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at the same time as the combined political and economic power of their daddies' corporations fed the NSDAP. But the two phenomenons are not comparable. Industrialists like Thyssen and Krupp (of the steel corporations) poured money and reputation into the NSDAP, and the money contributions were institutionalized as Adolf-Hitler-Spende der deutschen Wirtschaft (Adolf Hitler Donation of the German Industry). The German Wikipedia article on the NSDAP has a section about support of the NSDAP by the German industry and commerce. For starters, read the history of Thyssen, Krupp, IG Farben, Volkswagen, and German banks.

If you haven't found evidence, then you haven't looked. Numerous German and Austrian corporations finally got around to (or had to, in some cases) pay reparations for their crimes over recent years.

I was under the impression that China was moving away from Windows...

:-/

black rappers are not having to pay for their freedom of expression from their own pockets.

Umm, yes they do, whether it's by using credit cards to generate inventory that is sold out of their trunks, or via record company "advances".

if we take this into account, we can say that freedom of expression was hampered.

Again, I still don't see it. Imus can start a daily podcast for a couple of thousand dollars that would have world-wide reach. Given that he was reportedly paid $8 million per year, he has the resources. He certainly has the built-in audience.

its like democracy - everyone can be candidates, but only the rich can get elected. just like this is a democracy in appearances only, that type of freedom of expression is also one that is in appearances. whatever you say, if you dont have the means to reach people, it wont matter.

I agree 100%. However, Don Imus certainly has the means to reach people.

H&R Block had a similar issue with their online tax prep software back in February:

news.com.com article
Businessweek article

I hate it when people understate the popularity of the Zune like this.

There are, in fact, sixteen Zune owners.

Makes you wonder if this (Business)Week's cover story is right, Is Google Too Powerful?

Microsoft needed a quick and easy way to scare businesses away from Linux. But, oh no, their normal smear campaigns haven't been working. What to do?

Step 1: Find an old UNIX company that isn't adapting well to computing where big-iron and *NIX workstations aren't the hot technology on the block.

Step 2: Get an investment company to pour cash into the company at your bidding.

Step 3: Create a lawsuit guaranteed to last for at least four or five good years. Sue everyone who touches Linux, including high-publicity companies that use it, companies that contribute code, and so forth. Drag it out as long as physically possible.

When all is said and done, SCO's offices will have a For Rent sign on the door, the board of directors will be either rich or indicted. And Microsoft? Microsoft walks away with clean hands, without directly paying SCO.

Really, it is a beautiful strategy -- best case, enough uncertainty is created that companies buy Windows licenses for their servers. Worst case, Microsoft gives Baystar a wink and a nod, as well as an investment that will more than offset the SCO fiasco. Everyone wins but SCO.

Greenpeace's claims have been analyzed in this BusinessWeek article and in a series of articles at roughlydrafted.com. One conclusion both sources make is that Greenpeace applies different criteria to different companies and seems to be targeting Apple due to the company's visibility.

In virtually every field, like you write, the USA is a minority leader. For instance, it has the largest single country economy in the world, however it's economy represents only about 30% of the entire world's, and is rougly the same as that of the European Union. In addition, this position is not guaranteed for ever. Again, for instance, the average world's economy grows faster (about 5%) than the US's (about 3%). The situation is comparable in the EU.

In the next few decades we are likely to see the economic or otherwise importance of the West diminish, and in particular that of the US. The Economist foresees that China will be the dominant economy by 2050. Now western economies represent about 60% of the world's GDP, but by then it will be less than 30%.

Just about the only area where the US is an undisputed leader is the military, but I'd argue that this is of limited value in a democracy.

Perhaps I got the wrong person breaking the crank but the crank did break. But at least I don't resort to name calling like a 4 year-old child would when I disagree with someone.

Thailand says they don't want the OLPC, and so does India critics from those countries have cited that the OLPC is not mature enough and doesn't have the quality that they need for their education system.

Have you seen the OLPC specs?

433Mhz processor
7.5 inch LCD display
No rotating media (no floppies, CDs, DVDs)
No hard drive but a 1024Mbyte flash drive.

The quality of this laptop is far below the standard that other laptop makers use, while this quality might have been good for 1993, times have changed. India, Thailand, and other nations want a more mature OLPC program with a better quality laptop that can compete with modern laptops. Students want to use CDs and DVDs on the laptops, and be able to bring data to them from older systems that use floppy disks. They want to store media files and that 1024M of storage will fill up fast. I mean for the modern student that wants to record a video presentation for class, this laptop will not do. Not only that but the 7.5 inch screen is tiny and hard to read.

This looks like the type of Laptop that Mattel or some other toy maker might make. Are you kidding me?

If anyone should have their intelligence questioned it is the people in the OLPC program.

Consumer Reports and others have not ranked Dyson anything more than average. I used to have other links, but that was 2 years ago when I was in the market for a new vacuum cleaner. I needed one that would clean dog hair out of the carpet without jamming the power head (3 chows produce lots of hair). The top rated vacuum for pet hair was the $500 Kenmore model. I bought it and I've been happy with everything but robustness of the powerhead. Fortunately, the 5 year extended warranty has already proven worth the $60. :)

In the reviews I read at the time, Dyson was at or near the bottom of every review set. Rainbows above $1200 were also considered, so it wasn't price that was a driver here. That link above lists someone saying something along the lines of "OMG - look how much crap came out of my carpet!" and somehow psychologically that states that the clear cylinder Dyson "cleans" the carpet better than, say, a bagged vacuum. Rainbow owners I know said the same thing, since you get to see the dirt every time you vacuum as you have to dump the water out. I wonder if these folks have ever looked into the vacuum bag after a single vacuuming? During shedding season, that's about how long a bag lasts. :-/

In any case, the reviews that convinced me Dyson stunk were the ones that measured exhaust particulates. Dyson came in dead last in the class of vacuums claiming to have hepa filters etc. I was also turned off by having to dump the dirt in a messy operation into the trash. Same issue with the Rainbows, although they performed near the top for particulates. Something about sucking air through water really filters out a lot of airborne crap.