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What Sony management does not seem to realize is that the American middle class will pay a premium only if the product offers premium quality. Nowadays, I do not see much difference, in quality, between a Sony electronic gadget and, say, a Panasonic electronic gadget. I refuse to pay the Sony premium. Increasingly, other potential and current Sony customers refuse to pay a premium without a corresponding premium in quality. For the year ending on 2006 March 31, the electronics divison of Sony lost $0.6 billion ($1.1 billion - $1.7 billion).

If Sony maintains the $600 price tag, Sony will lose the gaming console market to Microsoft. Armed with a well-funded research division, Microsoft poses a formidable threat to Sony.

P.S.
Curiously, with the fading away of Bell Laboratory as the premier industrial laboratory, Microsoft's research division now assumes the mantle of America's #1 industrial laboratory. It is certainly the coziest laboratory, funded by an almost limitless supply of money from Microsoft.

In October of last year, Sam Palmisano announced that IBM's policy was never to use genetic information as a basis for hiring or eligibility for health insurance. To me it seemed like a wacky announcement to make at the time, yet here we are less than a year later and it seems less crazy and more prescient.

If one comes with the logo of your car brand and the other comes in a plastic bag with chinese instructions. Easy choice.

I'm guessing you didn't read about the entire corporate structure faking being NEC that was producing material in perfectly authentic (looking) boxes with the NEC label, instructions, and warranty information, being sold in major stores as NEC equipment.

Well, but think that the US has already performed industrial and commercial espionage too agains EU and Japan, using the Echelon data.

Related to Chinese censorship, now they have students policing eachother.

Internation Herald Tribune - Students put China's spin on Web

Just thought it was related, interesting read.

Brazil actually has a growing obesity problem. And their diet is supposedly not that great. http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/01/13/news/brazil .php

RTFA http://iht.com/articles/2006/04/28/yourmoney/msft. php: "Sun Microsystems settled with Microsoft for $1.6 billion in April 2004, while Novell settled in November 2004 for $536 million. RealNetworks dropped out in October 2005 after settling for $761 million."

The IHT of this weekend also has a frontpage article about the French "iPod law" and the call for open source as the way forward.

Article all on one page
http://iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2 006/04/28/yourmoney/msft.php.

But speaking of hairy, I want an RMS pony!

OMG!!! RMS PONIES!!!

From the article on NEC being pirated: http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/04/27/business/ne c.php

"After a visit to the Microsoft headquarters in Seattle on April 18, Hu said the protection of intellectual property was crucial for China's future."

A quick visit to old Billy-boy, a squak about IP protection, and a $900m deal? Interesting.

-Rick

I guess it's because of a different attitude to work we have here. For example, I'm starting in my new position in a week. I'll be eligible to one week of vacation per year after six months of work. Between now and the first opportunity to get vacation I'll have three paid holidays. And you know what? I'm so excited about the job that I'm actually starting a week earlier than my job contract tells me to. I'm really looking forward to it, because I believe I'll be appreciated, and that my contribution will have a tangible impact on the company's growth.

Now, I don't know how exactly it is in Europe (which may sound strange, as I still hold an EU passport even though I've been living in the US for 12 years), but recently I've read a news article where a FRench Economics professor is saying: "I was surprised to see that people actually enjoyed working in a company." This is beyond my capacity to understand. By default, I always assume that people enjoy their work, while she seems to be thinking otherwise.

I believe it is this lack of understanding that prompts Americans to mock the French work conditions. I, and most other people I know, simply can't understand why would anybody need six or more weeks of vacation time, on top of a 35-hours work week.

If you have one of the world's most recognized brands at your disposal, how fast do you jettison it in favor of marketing a new, unknown brand in its place?

When Lenovo, the Chinese maker of personal computers, bought International Business Machines' PC business for $1.75 billion in December 2004, the deal included the rights to use the IBM name for five years. Lenovo executives figured rightly that the IBM brand would still resonate in the U.S. market and serve to assuage the worries of existing and prospective customers of the IBM ThinkPad line of laptops. They realized there would be concern about buying from a China-based company that American customers had never heard of.

Yet Lenovo has moved far more swiftly to remove the IBM name from its brand-building venture than analysts and marketing experts had expected, leaving many wondering if Lenovo has abandoned the IBM brand too quickly.

Something tells me this is one of those Chinese Government edicts that will be largely ignored once Mr. Bush leaves China.

Hu Jintao is coming here. Addressing software sharing is one of the few visible things he can do that will cost him nothing. Currency revaluation is what he is desperate to avoid. Why the US sees fit to give this guy a victory lap I'll never know.

"Windows is now so big and onerous because of the size of its code base, the size of its ecosystem and its insistence on compatibility with the legacy hardware and software, that it just slows everything down," noted David Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School. "That's why a company like Apple has such an easier time of innovation."

Asphalt or tar compounds

These have more info than the BBC story
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/04/05/news/teeth. php
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/04/04 05_060405_teeth_drill_2.html

On the contrary, we're proposing 500% more than what professor Joost Smiers suggests here

On the contrary, we're proposing 500% more than what professor Joost Smiers suggests here (Op-Ed in the International Herald Tribune). I think that's being more than fair.

On the other hand, do we really want music made only by people who are in it for the money? Who are created by record companies to appeal to a mass market? Ready-made instant megastars who drain the resources from all deserving garage bands out there?

Or do we want music created by people who really want to create, who have something to say and can make a decent living out of it? Maybe not creating a market where ten people earn enough to buy a LearJet, but where tens of thousand earn enough to get a really nice car.

from India, via the International Herald Tribune, as well as the Wall Street Journal (print edition).

that's where I read it.

If that's true, then why do 75-80%of mutual funds under perform the S&P index? Sure, maybe some mutual funds also buy high and sell low, but statistically no more than half of funds can do that in a market generally trending upwards. Therefore owning the 500 biggest publically traded US companies is a successful investment strategy, even if index funds must pay up a bit when a company is added to the index.

This is the article that originally somewhat changed my mind about gold farming, the people behind, not the actual act.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/12/08/business/ga ming.php

I had mentionned they live in difficult situation because, yes, they do have a roof but knowing that most of them are being paid .25c an hour wiht 12hours shift, I wouldnt describe that as a good situation.

Apparently now they make $250 US per month, how many of us can make a living out of that? .. and it used to be $75!

and their offices ain't exactly penthouse either. Its more like a 4x4 desk, in a dark and humid place, with poor lighting.

Besides, with overpopulation in china, im sure a young person would take just about any job as long as it gets them money, its better than nothing.

I know that in the WoW world, farming isnt so good, but the complaining about the farmers ain't part of the solution, trying to reach somekind of agreement with gold farming companies would be more the way to go (for instance).

*sigh* Yes, there is. If I have a hammer and you also want a hammer so you copy my hammer by manufacturing one yourself, just like mine, have you just stolen my hammer then? Even though I still have my hammer, right here? Because that's actually what you're saying.

You cannot make a big budget action movie by 'touring', 'selling merchandise' or any of the self-satisfied rationalizations people have suggested that musicians turn to.

No, but you can't realistically build a real movie theater at home either. Any way value is added, it can be exploited to drive sales of a good or a service. In Singapore, movie theaters have luxury seats and serve meals as an added value to the movie. Economically, there is no longer any added value in making a copy so it should not be used as the basis for value. Economics 101.

References:
Mindjack - Piracy is good?
International Herald Tribune - Imagine a world without copyright
A History And Possible Future Of Cinema
First Monday - Piercing the myths of p2p
TV Week - NBC: iPod Boosts Prime Time
Stealing Music
Roderick T. Long - The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights

wrong picture about the UK and essentially all European countries -- like it's all gloom and depression here, right, we're all on the verge of killing ourselves

I can tell you're just copying accusations from another poster. "Kuffar" isn't the proper grammatic word, so you're getting your so-called knowlege fourth-hand. This whole "Muslims are allowed to lie until they control the world" garbage I keep hearing smacks of the same prejudice as the Jews suffered because of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." It's propaganda that is always used when you want to get rid of people, "Sure they sound good in public, but in their secret meetings, they outline their evil plan."

If you're going to say that Surahs and Hadiths make murder allowable, I'd like you to prove it.

According to the US State Department's report, South America has more terrorism than the Middle East. You just hear more about the Middle East on the news. False perception, its like how people are more afraid of flying then driving, when cars kill so many more.

Good, now you can understand that just because terrorists or guerillas are "Christian," that doesn't make the religion to blame. From 1980-2003, the Tamil Tigers committed 76 suicide bombings, while Hamas did only 54. Even among Muslims, secular groups like the Kurdistan Workers' Party, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades account for more than a third of suicide attacks. (source)Therefore, you can't blame the religion if secular-minded groups do it.

I have yet to hear the Ayatollahs (let alone one of them) denounce the violence.

You just proved his point - they've been doing that from the very beginning. Maybe you should ask yourself if your news sources are trustworthy?

(While doing some quick googling to find sources in English on what I've already read in my native language, I'm a bit amazed as to how extremely US centric Google News is. I've never noticed this before - or it's part of the propaganda machine this thread is all about)

http://www.arabamericannews.com/newsarticle.php?ar ticleid=4475

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfi le=data/theuae/2006/February/theuae_February319.xm l&section=theuae

http://news.inq7.net/nation/index.php?index=1&stor y_id=65780

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/02/13/news/cartoo n.php

http://www.antara.co.id/en/seenws/?id=8873

Yea, right, we will just put economic sanctions China.

Intelligent Design, theory that some complex biological structures and other aspects of nature show evidence of having been designed by an intelligence. Such biological structures are said to have intricate components that are so highly interdependent and so essential to a particular function or process that the structures could not have developed through Darwinian evolution evolution... ... and therefore must have been created or somehow guided in their development. Although intelligent design is distinguished from creationism creationism or creation science, belief in the biblical account of the creation of the world as described in Genesis , a characteristic especially of fundamentalist Protestantism, by not relying on the biblical account of creation, it is compatible with a belief in God and is often explicitly linked with such a belief. Also, unlike creationists, its proponents do not challenge the idea that the earth is billions of years old and that life on earth has evolved to some degree. The theory does, however, necessarily reject standard science's reliance on explaining the natural world only through undirected natural causes, believing that any theory that relies on such causes alone is incapable of explaining how all biological structures and processes arose.

"Charles Thaxton referred to a theory that the presence of DNA in a living cell is evidence of a designing intelligence. We weren't political; we were thinking about molecular biology and information theory. This wasn't stealth creationism. The phrase became the banner that we rallied around throughout the early '90s. We wanted to separate ourselves from the strict Darwinists and the creationists."

Last I checked, Ericsson was a Swedish company (which, according to the article was the provider of the equipment). Also, one of the phones that was tapped was a US Embassy phone. Maybe the Swedes were spying on the Greeks--we should not forget that Sweden was an aspiring nuclear power (or read this). Maybe they want to become a superpower...

Easy: go to fair.org

1) A link to the index page of an media watch dog is not putting up some numbers. Is this part of your scientifically rigourous approach to facts? I'm familiar with the FAIR website -- just where does it give numbers that show the proportion of journalists that fabricate stories, let alone indicate that it's "lots" of them? In fact, FAIR clearly doesn't believe that journalists "fabricat[e], or close to it" articles, or that the journalistic profession is endemically corrupt, or they wouldn't (from their "About Us" page) "defend working journalists [and work] with both activists and journalists. We maintain a regular dialogue with reporters at news outlets across the country, providing constructive critiques when called for and applauding exceptional, hard-hitting journalism." And many current and former subscribers to FAIR (including myself) are journalists, and FAIR is regularly quoted by journalists in both the mainstream and alternative press.

2) Pointing to scientfic literature is a non sequitor. Scientific papers, to have any value at all, confine themseleves to science. As the recent court case against intelligent design showed, attempting to broaden science to cover the full spectrum of human experience and thought is antithetical to what science is. Trying to compare scientific literaure with journalism is apples to oranges. Journalists, even when striving to be as accurate, well-researched and fair as humanely possible, don't write articles like scientific papers because it would be wholly inappropriate. Journalism has different objectives, with different audience demands. Scientific reportage of facts is designed to allow other scientists to recreate those the process by which those facts were derived. Journalists don't do that -- for example, because Woodruff and Bernstein didn't tell every reader of the Washington Post exactly how they too could reproduce their reporting, should readers have rejected the evidence of corruption within the Nixon administration?

3) By the way, if you're looking for universal factual purity in scientific comunity, you're on a fools errand: scientists are heavily incentivized to "make a name for themselves" too, with direct inducements in the form of academic and institutional positions and grant monies. Here's a hard statistic: The Journal of Cell Biology recently reported that some 25% of manuscripts submitted to it have had images that were manipulated in some way that violates their guidelines. This isn't to attack cell biology as a crock, just to let you know that science isn't some totem that you can fetishize into a gold standard by which to weigh journalism.

4) "I'm not talking about the deliberate deceptions that a number of journalists have been caught at, I'm talking about journalism itself" Ah, just as predicted, weasling. You originally wrote; "that's what a lot of [journalists] do. The bad part is that a lot of the effort that goes into their stories is fabrication or close to it.". A fabrication is a deliberate deception. Non-deliberate deception is usually covered under the terms 'bias' or 'error'-- the FAIR website can tell you more about this. And you weren't talking about journalism, you were talking about journalists, so you were talking about deliberate deceptions commited by a (still unspecified) number of individuals. You were also dismissing a commenter's opinion on the basis that they hadn't met any journalists. And again, if meeting journalists is your criteria for the worth of an opinion, just how many have you met?

First of all - have you actually read any Chinese laws? No? You can get them in translation, and they are not really all that draconian;

*AHEM*

From the RConversation blog:

"In the final days of December, Anti became a vocal supporter of journalists at the Beijing Daily News who walked off the job after the top editors were fired for their increasingly daring investigative coverage, including some recent reporting on the recent police shootings of village protestors in the Southern China. (For all the gory details on the current press crackdown click here, here, here, and here.)

In other words, Microsoft is scratching China's back in supporting the slaughter of innocents, and shutting the mouth of whoever tries to bring that to the public.

If that's not Draconian, my friend, then I don't know what the eff it is.

First of all - have you actually read any Chinese laws? No? You can get them in translation, and they are not really all that draconian;

*AHEM*

From the RConversation blog:

"In the final days of December, Anti became a vocal supporter of journalists at the Beijing Daily News who walked off the job after the top editors were fired for their increasingly daring investigative coverage, including some recent reporting on the recent police shootings of village protestors in the Southern China. (For all the gory details on the current press crackdown click here, here, here, and here.)

In other words, Microsoft is scratching China's back in supporting the slaughter of innocents, and shutting the mouth of whoever tries to bring that to the public.

If that's not Draconian, my friend, then I don't know what the eff it is.

i think, in situations like this, business has an opportunity to change the world more than governments. but everyone seems to bow to the pressure.

The International Herald Tribune http://www.iht.com/, has a nice layout.

It's hard to tell from the site, but I think IHT is a New York Times publication. See... http://www.iht.com/images/misc/breakfastsub33.jpg

The International Herald Tribune www.iht.com

You'll want to click on an article to discover the true value though as it doesn't get really good until you start reading content...

Notice how the entire article is already loaded into the page but it's broken up into 3 column sections that shuffle to a new page of text when you click the 'next page' button (which is triggered by clicking anywhere on the first or third columns), without reloading the html page (and without reloading a bunch of ads and all the 'extras' including the useful tools).

This design is sooo much easier to read than any other I've found.. the only thing that comes close is a simple long page of text but even that has it's drawbacks as it becomes difficult to read when you are constantly scrolling every few paragraphs. In fact if you want to read it that way they have an 'article tool' to 'change the format' to vertical scrolling as well.

The only thing I can think of to make it better is if they used keybindings on the arrow keys and pg up pg dn keys to control the buttons (though this is probably an issue of standard behavior across browsers at this time).

On the commercial side of things, it looks like their text ads at the bottom are also going to be the most relevant ads they can be as they are based on the entire text and not some short summary or 1/5 of the article.

As for the rest of the site... it's clean. Yes there are ads but they don't let them be too obtrusive and they way it's layed out, if you have ad blocking enabled, you won't even notice them being gone (which not all sites do well.. often removing the ads ruins the overall layout and is just as difficult to read as having them in).

IHT is an exemplary site. I won't compare their content but as far as design and usability is concerned, they are the #1 Newspaper site on the web today.

The International Herald Tribune www.iht.com

You'll want to click on an article to discover the true value though as it doesn't get really good until you start reading content...

Notice how the entire article is already loaded into the page but it's broken up into 3 column sections that shuffle to a new page of text when you click the 'next page' button (which is triggered by clicking anywhere on the first or third columns), without reloading the html page (and without reloading a bunch of ads and all the 'extras' including the useful tools).

This design is sooo much easier to read than any other I've found.. the only thing that comes close is a simple long page of text but even that has it's drawbacks as it becomes difficult to read when you are constantly scrolling every few paragraphs. In fact if you want to read it that way they have an 'article tool' to 'change the format' to vertical scrolling as well.

The only thing I can think of to make it better is if they used keybindings on the arrow keys and pg up pg dn keys to control the buttons (though this is probably an issue of standard behavior across browsers at this time).

On the commercial side of things, it looks like their text ads at the bottom are also going to be the most relevant ads they can be as they are based on the entire text and not some short summary or 1/5 of the article.

As for the rest of the site... it's clean. Yes there are ads but they don't let them be too obtrusive and they way it's layed out, if you have ad blocking enabled, you won't even notice them being gone (which not all sites do well.. often removing the ads ruins the overall layout and is just as difficult to read as having them in).

IHT is an exemplary site. I won't compare their content but as far as design and usability is concerned, they are the #1 Newspaper site on the web today.

Re: Google wouldn't put the same pics of US installations would it?

Exactly! This is the argument that has to be made. Frome this recent report (originally from IHT):

But a number of security restrictions apply to those companies. For instance, United States law requires that images of Israel shot by American-licensed commercial satellites be made available only at a relatively low resolution. Also, the companies' operating licenses allow the United States government to put any area off limits in the interests of national security. A 24-hour delay is mandated for images of especially high resolution.

Also, the original report (that started this discussion) quotes the minister as saying, "GoogleEarth has expressed its readiness to have discussions with the Government regarding the issue."

I agree, however, that this can only be a short term measure. I mean, how much of extra time and money does it require for someone to get the exact location of these installations? Couldn't someone just walk by them with a GPS enabled gadget and get this information easily?

But don't cirticize the government too much - that is **anti-American** and if you do that, then the terorrists win!

Unless *you* are a terrorist too - we'd better tap your phone lines without a warrant to make sure.

Honestly I am sick and tired of people ranting about '4 year degrees' from India and incompetent or unqualified programmers/workers from India. The very same people whose ideas about India are pretty much restricted to the Taj Mahal and Bangalore in spite of the fact that they could not point out both their locations on a map of India the size of the empire state building with both places marked in 2000pt arial black.

4 year degrees in India are _not_ like 2 year boot camps, they are quite focused, well designed and well executed programs, and I did not even go to an IIT or a tier 1 school in India! Education in India is quite difficult, simply because of the extreme competition every student faces from the 100 million other students, the fact that the coursework is tougher does play some part though. Parents are focused on education and education only, hence the complete insignificance of college/university level sports and/or other activities. The problem you guys face is that its too damn expensive here. My entire college expenses, including living away from home was approx. $1200. As a result almost anybody who can make the cut can afford it. So dont blame the Indian education system for the lack of a job inspite of your expensive education.

Regarding incompetent, inexperienced workers, well considering the large number of qualified workers produced, per the law of averages quite a few will be bad programmers, and stating that its an Indian issue, is not only unfair, its blatantly uninformed. The same statistics apply everywhere. The number of absolutely incompetent American/western programmers I have seen is quite unbelievable considering their '$100,000' education. At least Indian universities do not charge that much for a job screwed up (well some do, but they are usually reserved to educate Indians residing in the US).

Re: Only drudge work gets outsourced, of course on /. you only hear about programming/IT outsourcing, but if you actually watched some 'news' instead of relying on a bunch of bloggers alone, you might realize that its not just call centers and programming shops, a whole bunch of financial analytics work, medical diagnostic work, even Hollywood animation stuff gets outsourced to India. And oh btw re: the comment about paralegals and drudge work, find out how much a paralegal with your experience makes, and you will realize the futility of your chosen vocation to provide you with a reasonable income.

I agree that quite a few outsourcing projects failed miserably. However AFAIK in most cases they fail not because of incompetent Indian workers but simply because the it being applied to the wrong fucking problem. You cant just use a tool/process willy-nilly because its inexpensive and expect it succeed. On the other hand I know of quite a few that succeeded in spite of that. Go figure!

The comment regarding the infrastructure issues are correct, however that does not seem to have stopped organizations from delivering. BPO providers have usually figured out ways to deal with government incompetence, and will continue to do so until the Indian govt. gets off their lazy asses and does something about it. Fortunately or unfortunately we have a _real_ multi-party democracy which means things get done slowly but when they get done they get done right.

Finally you might be surprised to know that there are Americans interning in India:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/08/10/business/in tern.php
http://www.uh.edu/ednews/2005/nytimes/200508/20050 810india.htm
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,47435,00 .html

So before you go off on India and Indians take step back and actually bother to find out wtf you are talking about, even if you are posting on /.

Knowledge is power, more power than any firearm or bomb can give you.

Well the Tibetans, and anyone with access and interest in non-CCP-revised history books, know that Tibet is only "inalienable part of Chinese empire" because certain Mao Zedong sent his battle-hardened communist party army to invade it in 1950. Tibet had decided to give up militarism in favour of buddhist studies centuries earlier (they even invaded China's imperial capital once, but that was settled for an eternal peace and respect for each others' sovereign borders...) so they were easy prey for their indoctrinated and military-expansionist neighbour.

A few years later it took a massive UN-backed military expedition to save South Korea from being overran by the Maoist China-backed North. Tibet fell and remains under brutal occupation and genocidal policies by China, while in South Korea people are free.

If there is no cost involved in destroying one's neighbour (Tibet is actually being ripped off of its natural wealth), be it a trade blockade or military action, knowledge alone provides no protection to the victims.

Of course, in Tibet the occupying chinese are doing everything to distort and suppress information and communications to prevent the people from organizing uprisings, but even when they do rise up there are people like Hu Jintao (China's current Party supremo aka Butcher of Tibet for his brutality as the chief chinese CCP head in Tibet) who have no qualms about using military firepower against unarmed people.

It is extremely tragic that the Tibetans' non-violent struggle for freedom is being doomed by the indifference (and preference to do business with their occupiers instead) of the West. What would you do if you were a Tibetan under the dire circumstances? Knowledge hasn't helped and even if they had guns the chinese have a massive military superiority at every imaginable level.

It ain't easy being a freedom fighter these days. I mean terrorist of course...

But one of the participants in the project claims that 11 colonies from the set on which the paper was based on were fake. Which is likely to put the credibility of whole thing in a rather negative light in the scientific community, to put it mildly.

Anyone who reads my post's knows I'm pro MS, but I don't belive for a minute that MS sites have almost double Yahoo. The MS sites get about 114 million, not over 180 million like this report says. If that report were accurate, combined with the AOL deal, MS would have the most lucrative Advertising network the internet has ever seen.

This report also contradicts some stats (that I think are more inline with the truth) published by the NY Times and Associated press for the month of september.

Here are the numbers:
Yahoo = 123 million
AOL = 119 million
Microsoft = 114 million
Google = 87.6 million

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/11/06/business/ao l.php [iht.com]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/07/technology/07aol .html?hp&ex=1131426000&en=ca8853d306a6b3e5&ei=5094 &partner=homepage [nytimes.com]

http://washingtontimes.com/business/20051113-11344 1-2245r.htm [washingtontimes.com]

http://www.smartmoney.com/stockwatch/index.cfm?sto ry=20051115 [smartmoney.com]

Umm... really? What about this?

Google blocks sites at the request of the Chinese goverment, but they still haven't turned people in like Yahoo has.

> much like Indians have been able to do in a variety of ways for...oh, quite a while.

Nothing stops the reverse from happening though -- the odd thing is, getting an Indian work permit (especially for an American or European citizen) is laughably easy. Not many Indian companies look for American/European employees though, simply because at the end of the day not too many are interested. The downsides are:

- an Indian salary (even a generous one) means your savings get divided by 45 when you come back to the US. (Some Indian firms apparently offer USD salaries but I don't think they are that high)
- You'd probably have a nice enough standard of living by Indian standards but there's the tropical heat/rain
- and the _very_ different culture which some people might enjoy but which will drive others crazy

That said, I hear there are a number of East Europeans and Russian programmers who work in Bangalore (decent climate, savings comparable to those back home). Also a number of es/de/fr-speaking students have done internships at Indian companies eager to get some (non-English) foreign language skills on board. Most Americans who go there however seem to be fresh b-schoolers looking to get some experience.

Well my ankle grabbing fan-boy friend you are a fool. I will concede his numbers weren't 100%, but his point was. And realistically his numbers were close enough. Google is still dwarfed by the big boys, as you will see when I post the numbers below.

For the record he didn't say "search" he said "visitors". Advertisers don't just care about search cowboy. We are talking about revenue streams and market sizes. AOL may be 3% of the search market (according to your numbers) but they are 12% of Google's revenue (according to the links below). Looks like search isn't the end all and be all is it cowboy?

I'm just so sick of you cocky little troll like fan boys thinking you know something, but all you really know is how to download porn in your mom's basement.

Here are the numbers:
Yahoo = 123 million
AOL = 119 million
Microsoft = 114 million
Google = 87.6 million

Here is the math for ya:
AOL + MSN = 237 million
Yahoo = 123 million
Google 87.6 million

My sources are abundant from New York Times, Associated Press, to international papers. Here are 4 for you to check out, but there are PLENTY more.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/11/06/business/ao l.php

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/07/technology/07aol .html?hp&ex=1131426000&en=ca8853d306a6b3e5&ei=5094 &partner=homepage

http://washingtontimes.com/business/20051113-11344 1-2245r.htm

http://www.smartmoney.com/stockwatch/index.cfm?sto ry=20051115

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/12/04/news/india. php

Why is is moderated as a flame bait?

This is exactly what happend in sweden to latvian construction workers. See http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/11/21/news/laval. php

Also, it's almost impossible to find work in sweden with an arabic or african name even if you are educated at one of the state universitys. The are examples of people sending houndreds of applications and not even getting a letter back saying that they are being considered for the position. When these people emigrate i britian, canada, usa they find employement almost instantly.

So stop moderating things as flamebait just because it doesn't fit your world view. I though the readers of slashdot liked freedom of expression, or does that only apply when it's the "correct" expression?

Look at the page javascript: http://www.iht.com/js/articlelayout.js/.

It's pretty clever, they just divide up the article text and show/hide it with style settings. If you do View->Page Style->No Style (in firefox) you see the raw page layout (including the full article text), everything else, like positioning the main article and everything, is CSS.

The United Nation is not a for-profit organization? Really?

were arrested over bribery involving millions of dollars

in which one U.N. staffer, Alexander Yakovlev, was convicted in a Manhattan federal court this past August

step down from his post Monday amid allegations that he and the governing

Bailey's Compass Sacks Three Execs In UN Scandal

Germany Shocked by Damning Report On UN Scandal

More?

Sorry but this is just a load of bullocks...

The internet is a self configuring network, designed to withstand nuclear strikes. I think it can survive anything big business tries to throw at it. It doesn't rely on any particular means of transport, it'll go over optic fibre, down telephone and power lines, over satellite, wireless radio frequencies and probably quantum wahwah's within a few years. These blow hard's refered to in this article are living in the 90's if they really believe they're sitting on a gold mine with their network of cables.

Even if they could put pressure on the "Free Loaders", it wouldn't work, it's already been tried several times where a free internet service has built up a huge subscriber base only to be taken over and turned into a paid service.... guess what happens, everyone leaves and goes somewhere else. The technology is out there, the horse has already bolted, it can't be undone. I think the smart business men out there have already come to terms with this. Google's success is proof of it, it has constructed business model's that assume that the information services it offers to the public will never generate revenue for them directly, they rely on indirect means of earning income.

The internet/packet switching is arguably the greatest communication invention since the telephone. To think that anyone who invented it would give away control of it doesn't understand the power that one has by controlling it. In a greedy capitalist society, to give up control of the internet would be called 'socialism.'
From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism "Socialism is an ideology with the core belief that a society should exist in which popular collectives control the means of power, and therefore the means of production."

If someone else doesn't like the fact that the US invented and controls it, they should invent their own protocols/switches/languages and start their own system, right? Because the US is not just going to give up control that easily.
Good article to read on this:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/09/29/business/ne t.php
"The United States argues that a single addressing system is what makes the Internet so powerful, and moves to set up multiple Internets would be in no one's interest."
Unless, of course, you find it interesting to set up your own Inter/extranet.