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For some reason your link lead me a a page saying start an article. It apears to be the same as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_citybut took me to this page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_City/... Ahh i see now, it was the trailing /slash.

Any ways, it wasn't sarcasm, it was pure ignorance. Maybe because the CIA factbook i usualy reference doesn't list it as a country. This is fascinating.

I always though the vatican was just some religous camp who played too much into politics and peoples lives.

Taking into consideration purchasing power parity (PPP), India's GDP of $719.8 billion becomes $3.611 trillion. PPP adjusts the income approximately 5 times to the US Dollar. If the average salary in the US is $67,400, that is $13,480 in India's PPP terms. And the average salary for programmers in India is certainly above that. People need to understand its not about 'cheap labour'. Its just another feature of globalization.

India GDP Per Capita (2005): $3300

Nigeria GDP Per Capita (2005) $1400

https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos /in.html#Econ

https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos /ni.html#Econ

That is a significant number, especially given the fact that India's GDP is growing faster than Nigeria's is.

India GDP Per Capita (2005): $3300

Nigeria GDP Per Capita (2005) $1400

https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos /in.html#Econ

https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos /ni.html#Econ

That is a significant number, especially given the fact that India's GDP is growing faster than Nigeria's is.

I'm also an Argentinian, and the reactions of most slashdotters really puzzles me.
We are NOT living in mud huts.
Out literacy level is 97.1% [source]
Our GDP per capita is $13,100
Look at the Human Development Index Map, see that big country at the southmost part of south america? the GREEN one? That's Argentina

And one would think "geeks" would be the educated tipe of person...

My guess is that for 99% of the children in these countries, the laptops will be totally useless, because what those kids really need is food, a clean source of water, and (especially for the girls) a chance to go to school and become literate.

My guess is that for 99% of the children in these countries, the laptops will be totally useless, because what those kids really need is food, a clean source of water, and (especially for the girls) a chance to go to school and become literate.

My guess is that for 99% of the children in these countries, the laptops will be totally useless, because what those kids really need is food, a clean source of water, and (especially for the girls) a chance to go to school and become literate.

My guess is that for 99% of the children in these countries, the laptops will be totally useless, because what those kids really need is food, a clean source of water, and (especially for the girls) a chance to go to school and become literate.

Why can't you people ever spell Gandhi correctly?

Blame Ghana?

I wonder if this guy is probably just worried about offending microsoft who has lots of jobs in india, or if india still has the impression that they aren't 3rd world. india has only 60% literacy, which is quite bad. https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos /in.html

Eventually they will consider that a bad thing and do something about it.

No laptops, no business. 60% of grownups in India cannot read

Exaggeration. According to the CIA World Factbook, about 60 percent of adults in India can read. The figure weighs disproportionately in favor of men -- 70 percent are literate. In women the figure is less than 50 percent, but still not as low as the 40 percent you suggest.

thanks for the information.. I was going off of memory from what I learned a good 10 years ago.. so I'm not surprised it's out of date..

I'll add another source of information here: the cia factbook: https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos /us.html#People

Religions: Protestant 52%, Roman Catholic 24%, Mormon 2%, Jewish 1%, Muslim 1%, other 10%, none 10% (2002 est.)

The Continental Congress regularly received quantities of intercepted British and Tory mail. On November 20, 1775, it received some intercepted letters from Cork, Ireland, and appointed a committee made up of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Johnson, Robert Livingston, Edward Rutledge, James Wilson and George Wythe "to select such parts of them as may be proper to publish." The Congress later ordered a thousand copies of the portions selected by the Committee to be printed and distributed. A month later, when another batch of intercepted mail was received, a second committee was appointed to examine it. Based on its report, the Congress resolved that "the contents of the intercepted letters this day read, and the steps which Congress may take in consequence of said intelligence thereby given, be kept secret until further orders."

Finland is already economic and IT superpower. Guess where Nokia based in? ;)

It is a good idea to check https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/inde x.html before mocking countries. There is no wonder why CIA, among all the secret agencies on planet spares their time and bandwidth for such a project ;) Tax payers money you know.

That would mean that 1 in every 5 youths would have to become part of this program. Sounds....unlikely.

Sources:

1. Wikipedia (Demographics of Hong Kong) - 6.9 million in 2003
2. Wikipedia (Hong Kong) - 6.86 million in 2005
3. CIA World Factbook - 6.94 million in July 2006

Mind you, I happen to have had an echocardiogram just last week, my first, and it's a freakin' miracle to see all the little valves doing their stuff, and a technician watching my heart in real time for many minutes and making literally dozens of quantitative measurements without poking sharp things into me or injecting dubious "dyes" into me or (I trust!) toasting me with radiation.

But I have to wonder. If high-tech medicine is actually effective--not just awe-inspiring, exciting, and, well, entertaining--why is it that with so much of the stuff, the United States ranks about #40 in infant mortality (worse than New Zealand, Portugal, Slovenia)? Why is our life expectancy only 78 years when forty-seven other countries, including Aruba, Spain, and Iceland, do better?

Is it possible that we need less of these robotic surgeons and computer imaging centers and a few more humble, prosaic things... like visiting nurses, or immunization programs (How is it possible that people in the United States are still getting mumps)?

Mind you, I happen to have had an echocardiogram just last week, my first, and it's a freakin' miracle to see all the little valves doing their stuff, and a technician watching my heart in real time for many minutes and making literally dozens of quantitative measurements without poking sharp things into me or injecting dubious "dyes" into me or (I trust!) toasting me with radiation.

But I have to wonder. If high-tech medicine is actually effective--not just awe-inspiring, exciting, and, well, entertaining--why is it that with so much of the stuff, the United States ranks about #40 in infant mortality (worse than New Zealand, Portugal, Slovenia)? Why is our life expectancy only 78 years when forty-seven other countries, including Aruba, Spain, and Iceland, do better?

Is it possible that we need less of these robotic surgeons and computer imaging centers and a few more humble, prosaic things... like visiting nurses, or immunization programs (How is it possible that people in the United States are still getting mumps)?

According the CIA, here in the UK we have the second largest debt in the world. But we are of course a much smaller country than the USA so we owe about $117,000 each! Still we're not doing as badly as Ireland; they are on $250,000 each. I have no idea how this is sustainable.

I mean every household only owes about $400,000 in government debt which I'm sure is sustainable.

That number looked really wrong to me so I looked it up:
Debt = 8.4 trillion
Households = 110 million
Population = 295 million

So we owe $28,000 per person, and about $76,000 per household.

The EU has a population of approximately 450 million, while the US is around 300 million. The GDP, on a PPP basis, is approximately the same for both.

However, there is a wide gap between the top and bottom nations in the EU, particularly since the recent expansion. Looking at GDP per capita, the US is hardly exceptional on the world stage. It's not at the top of the list, and within about 75% you have most of central Europe and Scandinavia, Canada, Australia, and Japan, as well as several much smaller countries.

Personally, I can live with our modestly lower level of productivity (on that metric, at least - the reliance on PPP in a market which isn't 100% efficient is not a perfect model) in exchange for our much higher quality of life (most of those nations work shorter hours, take more vacation time, live longer, etc.) and not conceding inappropriate levels of power and influence to The Mighty Corporation. YMMV, of course.

I think Germany is pretty comparable to the US standard of living:

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ gm.html

Germany:

Exports:
$1.016 trillion f.o.b. (2005 est.)

Imports:
$801 billion f.o.b. (2005 est.)

They have other problems (runaway but unnecessary spending on welfare) and their debt is as high or higher than US. But someone needs to produce. A service based economy is fine, but until robots automate all production, I'm not convinced in the service based economy for the long haul:(

It's funny how Indians are so myopic about their own country. Despite dozens of studies by the UN and the WHO, they're in a perpetual state of denial. One merely has to walk down the street in India to see just how bad the conditions are. The child death rates are unbelievably high and the gaping maw between the wealthy and the poor only continues to grow. Plus the poor are extremely uneducated with a national literacy rate of only 65%. Even with the US having 12% living below the poverty line, we stand at an excellent 99% literacy rate.

  The link you posted to the CIA factbook was wrong. From the factbook, on poverty in India, they say "Population below poverty line: 25% (2002 est.)". So that's 4 years old to begin with.

  The infant mortality rate is rather high, and if 1 in 5 children in India die, that's pretty damn bad. Luckily for India, and according to the factbook, there are 24 births for each 8 deaths so the population should continue to explode as long as people have something to eat, and with women averaging 2.73 births each, so much the better.

  Actual link to the CIA factbook is http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ in.html .

  It's not nearly as rosy as Indians would have you think. Why do you think they send their best doctors and scientists overseas? They're not doing it to do the world a favor, they're doing it to escape desperate poverty, a wrecked environment, and the depressed state that is India.

The author , though his name sounds to be Indian, is a person from MARS, b'cos he knows nothing about India and its people. No place on earth has such an amazing amount of diversity and yet the country grows at a impressive rate of 8% per year , check this latest article "The dragon faces Indian FDI threat" by Yasheng Huang, a stickler for time and associate professor at the Sloan School of Management at http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/17 06117.cms Mr author fyivisit http://www.goodnewsindia.com/ to read 100% authentic and unbiased news about how indian poor and rich serve their country and their fellow citizens with amazing success. This site is not biased by any media or any politician or any author like you ! As rolfwind (another blogger) rightly pointed out ... before writing again on things such as numbers on exports, imports and poverty 'n blah blah ... please first check the facts verified ... http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ india.html [cia.gov]. Poverty in india is 25% from cia.gov while in US it is 12% ! so what is big difference if you consider the 1.1 billion population with that of 350million !! Can the author pls point out from he got the magical figure "less than $1 a day" figure ....i think author from MARS !!!

Unlike China, India still imports more than it exports.

If this is true, then my bad. Why the fuck do we take so much shit in the various trade agreements over the years? I always thought mining was a distant second to farming. Lousy media.

Lousy national party and their farm propaganda.

Australia has a population of 20,507,800.
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/94713ad445 ff1425ca25682000192af2/1647509ef7e25faaca2568a9001 54b63?OpenDocument
This is just a minor quibble, in the future please get your statistical information on Australia from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (www.abs.gov.au) the CIA's reputation for reliable intelligence is less than stellar (plus its insulting).

Besides in another country, 295,734,134 (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rank order/2119rank.html) people elected the wrong leader. Doesn't that compound the error about 15 times

Yes I know it's a cheap shot but you left yourself wide open. At least in Australia if our head of state is crap, we have the Queen to turn to.

so you're saying what america does in 200 million australia can do in 20 million?

Put the story in perspective: Only 20,264,082 (July 2006 est.) people live in Australia.

"Recognizing the threat Iraq's non-compliance with Council resolutions and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles poses to international peace and security"

Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade.

"What is at stake is how to answer the potential threat Iraq represents with the risk of proliferation of WMD. Baghdad's regime did use such weapons in the past. Today, a number of evidences may lead to think that, over the past four years, in the absence of international inspectors, this country has continued armament programs." -- Jacques Chirac, October 16, 2002

Actually, we can generate most things cheaper than any other nation on Earth, because of our advanced production technologies, which is why we are still the world's leading industrial power. It's the simple things which can be produced cheaply elsewhere, and even then it's a question of scale: can we develop custom robots to do the work cheaply enough to offset the benefits of nearly-free foreign labor plus shipping?

For almost every company in this country, the answer is "yes." Places like Nike and Reebok are an aberration: shoes are complex shapes to manufacture, but easy to explain, so in their case when those factories were built 30-40 years ago, that was the right way. You'll notice newer companies like Saucony and Teva are machine-manufactured domestically. Levi used to be a sweatshop employer too; now they cut the denim with high-pressure water.

We can compete with almost everyone on almost everything - and we do, quite successfully.

I get all my current geographical statistics from the CIA's free-to-public site, http://www.cia.gov/. Remarkable collection, really.

While I don't disagree with your point, I'd like to point out that Canada's literacy rate is 99%, not 97.

Dude, I bet you just did that because it said "breasts"

Hell, you'd probably click almost any breasts link... :-)

This means that in Europe, this guys would be really 1337 hax0rs :)

Or, maybe in, say Canada, where we use metric and where UBC happens to be.

An authoritative source puts the U.S. military budget at ~4% of the GDP. So... the entertainment industry is [claiming that they are] loosing an ammount that is close to half of what the United States Military-Industrial Complex eats up, every year -- due to illegal downloads and file sharing.

They're outta' their friggin' skulls.

HEAR THAT BLIZZARD? I NEED IT, and I have about 1,000,000 friends that agree with me.

My friends tell me Antarctica gets ignored because it has no people. I don't understand the reasons behind any continental divisions, but the familiar seven continents, other than the Europe-Asia distinction, seem to follow major tectonic plates. I assume other divisions are more population or cultural based, although Europe's conquest of North America seems to have mostly squashed the previous indigenous population while things are more intermixed in South America. Though the CIA World Factbook states "Not until 1840 was it established that Antarctica was indeed a continent and not just a group of islands." That may explain its omission by some cultures' count. I think I've exposed my ignorance too much already, so I won't say any more.

These people make decent money

I'm sorry, but $50/month is not decent money, by pretty much anyone's standards.

The GDP per captia in China is $6,800, 11 times what those factory workers are earning.

France
*Total Population: 60,876,136
*Internet Users: 26,214,174

China
*Total Population: 1,313,973,713
*Internet Users: 111,000,000

I think, that number speaks for itself.

*ref. from CIA World Fact Book

According to the CIA World Factbook, the population of France is 61,000,000, of which 18.3% are 14 or under, so the over-14 population is about 50,020,000. 165,000 is 0.33% of this. A petition signed by 0.33% of the population probably "represents" a significantly larger fraction of the population if you consider the difficulties of getting people to sign things and the fact that this is not the kind of issue that is constantly on most people's minds.

I don't think that higher productivity or more profit is the goal. I'm not sure where you got that from my reply...

The principle, or the goal if you will, is that the freedom to associate trumps any perceived right to work. That's not to say business should be completely unregulated, but that we should tread lightly. Legislation to regulate business is sweeping, while using the courts and a mentality of strict liability for damages could be better. This of course breaks down when plantiffs, (e.g. injured workers, or people downstream of a chemical plant), bring suit to a large company as the smaller parties don't have the resources to be heard properly. The one size fits all legislative approach leaves something to be desired, however. The lost time spent complying with the rules, (i.e. paperwork and buearucratic machinations), even if you were never going to break them, is a significant drain.

On a side, what about the goal of creating a better future? What great inventions have been lost because of over-regulation? This is not to say I favor lots of air polution or water polution. I don't. It's just something to consider. Would you trade a cure for all cancer for a totally corrupted lake?

Now, mega-corporations are hard to deal with, but certainly with small businesses are little more cut and dry. A small restaurant owner, for example, should not have to justiy her employment practices to anyone, much less the government.

What the Norwegian's do is their business. Certainly we have enough problems of our own without worrying about the nuances of their domestic laws. I was merely commeting on how I don't agree as it was in the context of a debate I was interested in. :)


Yet there's not really much evidence supporting this. If you look at countries like Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and Norway that have strong worker-protection laws, it's hard to show that they experience less productivity or less growth than comparable countries with weak worker-protection laws.

Consider India or China for a moment and their growth. This does not seem to be true.

Also check out the GDP Per Capita numbers. The only country to mention that is above the United States (#6) is Norway (#5). The next closest is Iceland at #11. Anyway I'm not sure you're right on this point. I think the United States treads a pretty nice line between over-regulation and non-regulation. Like the difference between France and China for example.

Right, nobody else has any titanium ore.

http://www.nap.edu/openbook/POD140/html/23.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanium#Occurrence
http://reference.allrefer.com/world/countries/sier ra-leone/geography.html
http://reference.allrefer.com/world/countries/indi a/geography.html
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ in.html
http://www.mixcorp.com/stcharles.htm
http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Latestprod ucts/582B60B066B26906CA2570DE00173BBD?opendocument

I have heard for a number of years about the idea that American (or other foreign, for that matter) companies will be able to open new markets and profits by selling their products (whether they be tangible goods or IP) or services in the People's Republic of China because they represent an "almost untapped market of new customers." But does this really hold true, especially for IT companies?

In the seventeen years I have worked in the IT industry (mostly at companies which sold software, but also for a hardware vendor) I have seen varying degrees of interest in selling products in China. For example, in the late 1980s through early 1990s, I worked at McAfee Associates, which even then had a fairly global presence due to marketing the product as shareware. We had never had any sales in China and, as a matter of fact, would regularly receive copies of our own anti-virus software from which our copyright and contact information had been removed and replaced with messages saying it was from the Ministry of Public Security and to contact them if a virus was found. Of course, changing the messages in the software also set off its own anti-tamper checks for signs of damage/infection by a computer virus, so we received plenty of copies of our own software where the warning message had been edited as well and were infected by computer viruses. Still, it is very hard to sell a product in a country whose government itself is hacking and pirating the same software you are trying to sell. When Bill Larson took over the company from John McAfee he expressed a strong desire to sell products in China, but when I left in the mid-1990s there was still no sales coming in from over there, other than the occasional ex-pat who registered a copy of the software.

Strangely enough, the only company I've worked for which has had some success in China is a telecommunications manufacturer, who makes equipment like VoIP PBXs, phones and so forth. They have had a few wins over there and even have a small sales office in Beijing. I was always surprised they never had problems like Cisco did with Huawei. But that's just one company and sales from other countries in the region (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, etc.) outstripped those. I haven't worked there since last year, but I doubt things have changed much.

So, where are the foreign IT companies which are making money in China? Cisco may have had some success there in the past, but Huawei and their "Cisco-like" products look like they are to overshadow them, and services like Alibaba, Baidu and QQ in China are already servicing the markets that Western ecommerce, search and community/messaging have had only limited success in reaching.

Federal republic - a state in which the powers of the central government are restricted and in which the component parts (states, colonies, or provinces) retain a degree of self-government; ultimate sovereign power rests with the voters who chose their governmental representatives.

Democracy - a form of government in which the supreme power is retained by the people, but which is usually exercised indirectly through a system of representation and delegated authority periodically renewed.

"Agency planned exercise on Sept. 11 built around a plane crashing into a building
Wed Aug 21, 7:45 PM ET

By JOHN J. LUMPKIN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - In what the government describes as a bizarre coincidence, one U.S. intelligence agency was planning an exercise last Sept. 11 in which an errant aircraft would crash into one of its buildings. But the cause wasn't terrorism -- it was to be a simulated accident.

Officials at the Chantilly, Virginia-based National Reconnaissance Office had scheduled an exercise that morning in which a small corporate jet would crash into one of the four towers at the agency's headquarters building after experiencing a mechanical failure.

The agency is about 4 miles (6 kilometers) from the runways of Washington Dulles International Airport.

Agency chiefs came up with the scenario to test employees' ability to respond to a disaster, said spokesman Art Haubold. No actual plane was to be involved -- to simulate the damage from the crash, some stairwells and exits were to be closed off, forcing employees to find other ways to evacuate the building.

"It was just an incredible coincidence that this happened to involve an aircraft crashing into our facility," Haubold said. "As soon as the real world ( news - Y! TV) events began, we canceled the exercise."

Terrorism was to play no role in the exercise, which had been planned for several months, he said.

Adding to the coincidence, American Airlines Flight 77 -- the Boeing 767 that was hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon ( news - web sites) -- took off from Dulles at 8:10 a.m. on Sept. 11, 50 minutes before the exercise was to begin. It struck the Pentagon around 9:40 a.m., killing 64 aboard the plane and 125 on the ground.

The National Reconnaissance Office operates many of the nation's spy satellites. It draws its personnel from the military and the CIA ( news - web sites).

After the Sept. 11 attacks, most of the 3,000 people who work at agency headquarters were sent home, save for some essential personnel, Haubold said.

An announcement for an upcoming homeland security conference in Chicago first noted the exercise.

In a promotion for speaker John Fulton, a CIA officer assigned as chief of NRO's strategic gaming division, the announcement says, "On the morning of September 11th 2001, Mr. Fulton and his team ... were running a pre-planned simulation to explore the emergency response issues that would be created if a plane were to strike a building. Little did they know that the scenario would come true in a dramatic way that day."

The conference is being run by the National Law Enforcement and Security Institute.

___

On the Net:

National Reconnaissance Office: http://www.nro.gov/

Central Intelligence Agency ( news - web sites): http://www.cia.gov/

National Law Enforcement and Security Institute: http://www.nlsi.net/ "

Although his link is from "prison planet" the original article is from AP.

Russia is actually a declining economic power, despite the aberation of growth that comes only because of high oil prices. China and India are the rising economic powers.

How do you propose to solve the Free Rider Problem or do you mean to suggest that Swedish taxpayers should fund a disproportionate share of the worlds' medical research costs while giving away the fruits of that labor?

The answer is that Sweden couldn't possibly do this alone. If nothing else, the US would hit us so hard with economic sanctions that we'd be forced to stop before we could even begin.

But if Europe does it together, there is nothing to stop us. US companies would be free to manufacture pharmaceuticals researched and developed in Europe, but European companies would be equally free to take advantage of the research carried out in the US.

Even if the US would keep the patent system (and it will, for the foreseeable future) the US patents only cover manufacuring and marketing in the US. European companies would be free to do whatever they wanted in Europe.

Europe is big enough, and spends enough money on pharmaceutical research, to refute any claim that we are freeloading on others. And if other nations wanted to freeload on us, that wouldn't be a problem under our proposed system. Indeed, it would be the objective!

And more importantly, in the real world: Europe is big enough to withstand any attempts at economic sanctions from the US. When you are talking economic warfare, size is all that matters. The smaller player get hurt the most, and will eventually have to surrender.

But the European Union is just as big as the US in economic terms. The excellent CIA Factbook has the answer, as ever.

Europe and the US each have 20% of the world's GDP. The rest of the world has 60%. And "the rest of the world" includes Brazil, India and China. Who's side do you think they would be on in a scenario like this?

So to summarize: You're quite right that Sweden couldn't do this alone. But Europe can.

And once we have Pirate Parties in parliament in most of the member states, we will.

More development of wireless access in developing nations seems expected. These nations don't have the resources to make everything landline and so they spend the money trying to improve their network prevalence through wireless methods.

I'm not just making this stuff out of my rear-end. Look at the land-line phone vs cellular phone use in the United States vs. a developing country like India or Pakistan . Cell phone use in developing countries is more prevalent than land-line phones. Why should we expect something different for wireless vs. land-line internet connections?

More development of wireless access in developing nations seems expected. These nations don't have the resources to make everything landline and so they spend the money trying to improve their network prevalence through wireless methods.

I'm not just making this stuff out of my rear-end. Look at the land-line phone vs cellular phone use in the United States vs. a developing country like India or Pakistan . Cell phone use in developing countries is more prevalent than land-line phones. Why should we expect something different for wireless vs. land-line internet connections?