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The problem comes when an ID system becomes mandatory or essentially mandatory for things it shouldn't be needed for in the first place

Excellent point, this is exactly the problem here. The legislation text itself says nothing at all about it being mandatory (although government lawyers in the 2017 Supreme Court case have argued that it should be). However, there are now at least 50 official schemes that require Aadhaar to utilise - anything from receiving social welfare payments, applying for a scholarship, opening a bank account, making any payment above a threshold (INR 50,000) or receiving treatment for - for example - HIV. So it isn't mandatory, but you basically need it to do anything remotely useful.

Not only this, but details of 130 million people and 100 million bank accounts have been leaked via four *government* websites, and a handy little backdoor has turned up (under the 'ExpressLane' programme) which allows the CIA real-time access to unencrypted Aadhaar data.

In short, it's a gigantic shit show.

Interestingly enough, the cabinet cleared a proposal for 10 new nuclear plants just yesterday.

So, what's your solution? For all of the whining and moaning, and hand wringing, it seems that the answer for so many slashdotters is "Jeezuz NO! not another change! Not a breakthrough! Stop reporting on stuff!"

My proposal would be to stop reporting on stuff that is 100% fluff, and 0% technical details.

This link might give you little more details - http://www.thehindu.com/sci-te...

India does have fabs

According to this, they were squabbling about failed "the country’s first semiconductor wafer fabrication unit project" as late as 2013.

I think the first link was suppose to point to something like this article.

As to how much the height of Everest has changed, that's what the entire point of the survey is to find out.

The agreement is bigger than just the aircraft. The basic cost of each aircraft is about 91 million euros.

Hindus come out on top, as they have for some time now: evidence that the more gods you believe in, the more successful you are in life.

A majority of Hindus in US will the upper caste (start from Brahmins) upper class who had the advantages of traveling to US for study (or work) and settled down. They are generically called "caste Hindus", they would be materially wealthy whether in US or India.

The right wing Hindu movement (not all of them are bat-shit evil, though quite ignorant) has a lot of support from US, so when the Indian PM Modi shows up at Madison Square Garden, he gets a full house. http://time.com/3442490/india-narendra-modi-madison-square-garden/

In India, they assert their power forcing down vegetarianism (this is a complex issue, which can be argued on moral, ethical and functional terms, here is a primer http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/on-diet-in-india-and-western-arguments-against/article7440854.ece, the usual fear of minorities, which includes Christians, lower caste Hindu's themselves, and other standard issue conservative and regressive ideals.

In USA, they will be seen as archaic with the next generation and the current Millenials, who had the fortune to study in secular American schools which promote some version of tolerance and humanism, which is closer to the core tenets of Hinduism in its truest essence...Tat Tvam Asi.

From The Hindu:
Hillary’s automatic green card proposal to benefit Indian students

"...
Ms. Clinton has promised automatic ‘green card’ or permanent residency to students who complete a master’s degree or a PhD from a U.S university. ..."

Nobody starves in India!

Are you serious? You really don't do any research, do you, before declaring yourself the authority on a subject? I mean... there are some falsehoods proclaimed by idiots on Slashdot, but this one takes the cake for the day.

More CHILDREN starve to death in India EVERY DAY than total malnutrition deaths in the US in a whole year. Including adults with eating disorders, abuse victims, etc.

There are MORE hungry people in India than anywhere else in the world. They have more than #2 and #3 (China and Pakistan) COMBINED. 24.4% of all malnourished people on the planet live in India.

No one is starving there

Despicable.

They started morphing into programmer mills churning out dBase III, COBOL, coders and now they teach everything from Java to Ansys Fluid Mechanics R17.1 (Register for two courses and AutoCAD is free!)

Besides the rural population you already mentioned, there are another 350M middle class there, and yet another 350M there that are quite well off, have access to excellent schools thus becoming as "highly skilled" as a westerner.

Why people want to claim such easy to disprove bullshit is quite befuddling. No country has a good balance between rich, poor, and middle class. The 1/3rd of the population you claim exists and is "quite well off" simply does not! India is very similar to the US where the top .01% own most of the country and the top 10% own 90% of the wealth just like the US. There are more people in extreme poverty in India which makes them worse than the US.

Getting a degree does not make a good and productive worker in a foreign country. If it did, every company would have more Chinese workers than Indian workers because that is who the numbers have favored for decades. There is quite a bit to that discussion, more than I care to get into in this thread. Anyone that has dealt with development and support out of a foreign country knows exactly what I'm talking about.

Your personal anecdote with hiring does not change the fact that H1B workers are easily pressured into working far more than anyone should. Recent criminal actions against several companies for human rights violations in the SF Bay area should make that abundantly clear, and we only know about the few that were abused to a point where they turned in their sponsors. Of course a H1B worker is "hard working"! That is the point of people calling it a legal indentured servitude. For every one company that uses the system correctly there are at least as many that don't.

Soon there will be a public interest litigation filed in the Supreme Court challenging the order and the court, probably already peeved at the government's ignorance of its refusal to block porn, would make the government overturn the order.

Also, not a good idea where every third person is youth [1].

[1]: http://www.thehindu.com/news/n...

Tell that to these people

Radhakrishnan was basically Indias "W. von Braun" and made ISRO the success it is today - including MOM. He just retired today.
After delivering five consecutive successful PSLV missions, including the PSLV-C08 that lifted Chandrayaan-I, and leading several crucial technology development at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), Radhakrishnan took the reins of India's space programme in November 2009.

With the 12 successful PSLV missions, the successful launch of GSLV with indigenous cryogenic stage, the Mars Orbiter Mission, LVM-3 experimental flight with CARE module, the six Insat/GSAT satellites, three navigation satellites and six earth observation satellites (including RISAT-1, the first microwave imaging satellite), Radhakrishnan is leaving Isro at its “most glorified pedestal ever”, it said.
He has been nominated to Natures top ten scientists list
http://www.thehindu.com/sci-te...
http://www.business-standard.c...

The Silk Railway: freight train from China pulls up in Madrid
The First Yiwu-Madrid Train Starts In Jinhua
Yiwu to Madrid cargo train could touch 3 billion lives
China flags train to Madrid to revive Silk Route

The Silk Railway: freight train from China pulls up in Madrid
The First Yiwu-Madrid Train Starts In Jinhua
Yiwu to Madrid cargo train could touch 3 billion lives
China flags train to Madrid to revive Silk Route

Local politicians in India have this predilection to rename everything. Costs very little financially and works as a kind of vote bank politics. Madras to Chennai, Bangalore to Bengalooru, Bombay to Mumbai, Calcutta to Kolkatta, Orissa to Odisha what the hell? There was guy named A Brito who was well known for his Letters to the Editor, Indian Express, Bangalore. When the local mayor renamed yet another road (which had been named for a British officer) after some local politician he wrote: "... To celebrate his grand achievement of renaming $road, I hereby propose we rename the Queen Victoria statue in the $park Mayor Butte Gowda statue. The resemblance is, after all, so striking that ..."

You claim to be hyper rational, but I see what sexism does to women first hand. In fact, your supposedly hyper rational view is provably pathetic nonsense. Women are discriminated against in STEM fields. Your argument is a typical horns of a dilemma, "if not this, then clearly that". You can't see any other reasons than 'choice'? Either you are knowingly posting a misleading argument, or you have shit for brains. Those seem to be the only choices.

Try searching for 'discrimination against women in STEM' for more information. In case you can't figure out how to use google, here is one.

With everyone from the federal government to corporate America working to encourage more women to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math fields, you would think the doors would be wide open to women of all backgrounds. A new study shows that this could not be further from the truth and that gender bias among hiring managers in STEM fields is extraordinarily prevalent.

Here is another one:

Despite efforts to recruit and retain more women, a stark gender disparity persists within academic science. Abundant research has demonstrated gender bias in many demographic groups, but has yet to experimentally investigate whether science faculty exhibit a bias against female students that could contribute to the gender disparity in academic science. In a randomized double-blind study (n = 127), science faculty from research-intensive universities rated the application materials of a student—who was randomly assigned either a male or female name—for a laboratory manager position. Faculty participants rated the male applicant as significantly more competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant. These participants also selected a higher starting salary and offered more career mentoring to the male applicant. The gender of the faculty participants did not affect responses, such that female and male faculty were equally likely to exhibit bias against the female student. Mediation analyses indicated that the female student was less likely to be hired because she was viewed as less competent. We also assessed faculty participants’ preexisting subtle bias against women using a standard instrument and found that preexisting subtle bias against women played a moderating role, such that subtle bias against women was associated with less support for the female student, but was unrelated to reactions to the male student. These results suggest that interventions addressing faculty gender bias might advance the goal of increasing the participation of women in science.

Concerning indians, here is another reference.

In short, when every reactor disaster is dismissed in an offhand manner with simplistic - "Well, those were old dangerous designs - everything is perfeclty safe now" http://www.thehindu.com/todays...

Well, those old designs were "safe" at one time also. we need better approaches than "Modern reactors are perfectly safe, and only stupid assholes can't see that."

Energy Source Mortality Rate (deaths/trillionkWhr)
Coal – China 280,000 (75% China’s electricity)
Coal – global average 170,000 (50% global electricity)
Oil 36,000 (36% of energy, 8% of electricity)
Coal – U.S. 15,000 (44% U.S. electricity)
Biofuel/Biomass 24,000 (21% global energy)
Hydro – global average 1,400 (15% global electricity)
Natural Gas 4,000 (20% global electricity)
Solar (rooftop) 440 ( Wind 150 (~ 1% global electricity)
Nuclear – global average 90 (17% global electricity w/Chern&Fukush)

Nuclear looks pretty safe to me.

In short, when every reactor disaster is dismissed in an offhand manner with simplistic - "Well, those were old dangerous designs - everything is perfeclty safe now" http://www.thehindu.com/todays...

Well, those old designs were "safe" at one time also. we need better approaches than "Modern reactors are perfectly safe, and only stupid assholes can't see that."

Given the totality of issues, and the obvious contempt many in the Pro-nuc power crowd have for anyone who dares to disagree with them, yeah, you're going to have problems with that approach.

I doubt too many people are going to as how they can get some of that good Fukushima action going for themselves.

Finally, I'm a little surprised that the superior beings don't realize that if the satellite were nuclear powered, it would not have been through a reactor, but a decay heat thermocouple based generator. Which can be made as close to perfectly safe as we can get.

Nice of the PM to visit and sit in on the last stage of the journey, putting science and scientists in the spotlight. Over here (NL) we hardly ever celebrate scientific successes, and accomplished scientists receive less attention and recognition from politicians than sports heroes.

Indeed, the Indian PM also tried to put this into perspective vis-a-vis sports wins with the following quote:
"This achievement is far greater than a cricket win"

(Source: http://www.thehindu.com/sci-te...)

"$33 dollars doesn't sound like much to people in the USA, but that is 2.2% of the average Indian person's annual salary"

Well somebody can afford them. In 2013: 4.14 million tablets sold, nine million iPads sold and 80.57 million smart phones by year end.

Indian Constitution Article 21: "Protection of life and personal liberty. No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law."

Note that the phrase "due process" is not in the Indian Constitution. For more information on why it was replaced with "according to procedure", see this reference.

And the other cable companies are free from NSA surveillance, is that what you're saying? Don't be naive. NSA has its fingers in ALL of them.

Heck, they're not even bothering with individual companies and are plugged right into the main trunk.
 

No photos? You even have a Wiki page!

It was an unrelated qualitative study, designed to "We conducted a qualitative research to explore care and support for children with AFP after their diagnosis."

I'm aware of that. I wasn't claiming that was the focus of the paper. The point was that the paper provided information about the coincident testing for NPAFP and vaccination, and thus the fact that they would occur together is not evidence for NPAFP causing NPAFP. Which would be why that quoted part didn't include such a claim and was on another line.
Just for fun, though, we have non-polio enteroviruses detected in numerous stool samples of those experiencing AFP and such enteroviruses can be associated with NPAFP. Seems like an possible cause for some of those cases.
There is also this article in 'The Hindi':

The non-polio AFP rate was not correlated with the number of oral vaccine doses that were administered, countered the WHO Country Office in its response. The largest number of oral vaccine doses given in India was in 2004, which had the lowest non-polio AFP rate in the last eight years. Moreover, although the number of oral vaccine doses given in the country had shown a continuous decline since 2007, the non-polio AFP rate had increased during the same period. In Bihar and U.P. too, there were similar trends of reduced oral vaccine doses and rising AFP rates during 2007-2011.

Maybe I'm not making this clear about the paper you're citing. It is a paper that makes big claims and provides no evidence. It's opinion. It's opinion, and an opinion that I have not seen replicated anywhere else, and that I have never seen supported by any other paper, ever. The comment to The Hindi by the WHO country office is in direct contradiction to the claims made in that paper (and for good reason: they were rebutting the paper).

Another interesting quote from the same paper [1] p. 116:

We have seen how polio, that was not a priority for public health in India, was made the target for attempted eradication with a token donation of $ 0.02 billion. The Government of India nally had to fund this hugely expensive programme, which cost the country 100 times more than the value of the initial grant.

It could have cost 40 bazillion times the value of the original grant, and that wouldn't make one iota of difference to the relationship between the polio vaccine and NPAFP.

So, the way it works is that Gates buys pharma stocks, then bribes few officials in India for $0.02 billion to make their country spend 100 times more on the program. Of course, the pharma makes big bucks not only on the vaccines, but far more on life-long "management" of the diseases they caused, all the while Bill's pharma stocks go up. Having been scammed of intellectual property by Microsoft in mid-1990s, I can see that Bill Gates hasn't changed his "ethics" one bit after moving into the "charity" business. It's same old Bill Gates.

And thus, he caught the bus to crazy-town.

NPAFP is a genuine problem, but it is a genuine problem that would be better addressed by addressing NPAFP rather than hanging off the words of one paper by two doctors in one country-specific medical ethics journal with no supporting evidence.

Well, you got someone to mod it back down. But here's the article from The Hindu, published November 2013.

"Just one in 10 women whose parents own agricultural land inherit any land, a soon-to-be-published study by U.N. Women and the land rights advocacy group Landesa has shown. Eight years after women were given equal inheritance rights in law, dowry is still seen as ‘adequate’ recompense for inheritance, the study finds." http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/just-one-in-10-women-inherits-land/article5399292.ece

Women are very likely to inherit gold in places where they are less likely to inherit land, and the correlation (if not causation) between gold consumption per capita and women's land ownership is clear. I'd always understood that people loved their daughters equally, but the tradition of giving the daughters gold and the sons land drove up gold consumption. If that's wrong, you should let thehindu.com know, and it would be helpful to offer an alternative explanation.

Maybe they're just trying to find where "stupid" is in DNA. Anyone that blindly and for no reason provides "the authorities" with their DNA are the sheep that "the authorities" are looking for. And then they spice that gene into an army of zombie-people that they're making in a lab somewhere, to replace the population that stands in their way.

Seriously though, what we need to know is: Who started this idea/concept, and how do we get them out of their position of authority? Hell India is all up in arms over the recent treatment of an Indian woman by US authorities. Why can't we do something similar here?

This government tried something similar against Vodafone in 2012 but got smacked down, first by the Supreme Court, and then by the Shome committe. The Vodafone case was quite similar because that too involved an M&A scenario and the government was claiming retroactive effect for some new tax laws.

Vodafone case details:
http://www.thehindu.com/business/companies/vodafone-wins-rs-11000-cr-tax-case-in-supreme-court/article2817238.ece

I suspect something similar will happen here and Nokia will settle for a significantly lower amount.

More details on the Nokia case:
http://www.thehindu.com/business/nokia-owes-rs21153-cr-it-dept-tells-delhi-hc/article5440948.ece

This government tried something similar against Vodafone in 2012 but got smacked down, first by the Supreme Court, and then by the Shome committe. The Vodafone case was quite similar because that too involved an M&A scenario and the government was claiming retroactive effect for some new tax laws.

Vodafone case details:
http://www.thehindu.com/business/companies/vodafone-wins-rs-11000-cr-tax-case-in-supreme-court/article2817238.ece

I suspect something similar will happen here and Nokia will settle for a significantly lower amount.

More details on the Nokia case:
http://www.thehindu.com/business/nokia-owes-rs21153-cr-it-dept-tells-delhi-hc/article5440948.ece

H1B's exist to drive down labor rates in the US, screwing over folks who are already here and they're not necessarily getting the best talent either. If you're telling me that Quality Shit Software couldn't find qualified candidates in the beltway for this project, then you're full of crap. That's not racist by the way and I object to the use of the term, but since QShit was looking for Business Analysts and Engineers, I know that there are plenty of those in DC who could have done the job. There's lots of these outfits out there, WiPro, InfoSys, Tata and others who use the H1B and pay less than other companies for the same work and sell themselves as saving money for the companies they work for. These are Indian outsourcing firms and they get called out even in their own nation. If we're going to have H1B Visas in this nation, then we damn well better insist that 1) Companies who are sponsoring H1Bs have done their due diligence in trying to find a qualified candidate already here. That means verification with screening results not just Taleo bullshit disqualification. 2) That the wages the H1B employee are paid are at least above the 80% percentile for the work, in the area where they're working and only for the duration of that work. 3) Once the work is finished, if the H1B candidate doesn't have a Green Card or is not on the path to citizenship, they need to go back and not job hop. Did you also know that the top ten sponsors of H1B visas or offshore outsourcing companies? That's another gap that has to be fixed, specifically companies that are in the body shop business need to be excluded from sponsoring H1Bs. I'm for letting people work in this country but the playing field needs to be a bit more balanced and indexed on unemployment figures as well, if that's racist to you then fuck off.

If you read down into the article you will see the court aspect that is news :)
"On Sunday"....."successfully petitioned the Supreme Court in that country to restrain moves by state governments to make Aadhaar mandatory for public services."
As linked, more at:
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/interview/aadhaar-infringes-on-our-fundamental-right-to-privacy/article5182765.ece

Every regime fears transparency and hates people who can think out of the box. http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/untouched-by-justice/article4340725.ece

By the time generics are on the market, few people will want to take it, even if it's superior and cheaper.

Ranbaxy also helped a lot in that department.

Photo of the above: http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/world/fury-in-europe-over-us-snooping-bugging/article4866765.ece?homepage=true

if you want to think differently, i suggest you google smallpox, or visit pakistan or northern india where they still have polio cases.

Actually India has been polio free for the last two years, and has even applied to the WHO to recognize that fact and declare the country free from the disease.

Link

Here's a more detailed look.

The important bit:

Glivec is the brand name of Imatinib. Novartis had applied for a patent for a modification of this drug, a “beta crystalline” salt form of Imatinib Mesylate or IM, which it said could be better absorbed by the body – by up to 30% more. After its patent application was rejected by the Patent office, Novartis moved the Intellectual Property Board, Chennai. The Board rejected the claim, but gave certain findings favourable to the company. Instead of filing an appeal before the Madras High Court, Novartis moved the Supreme Court.

A Bench of Supreme Court Justices Aftab Alam and Ranjana Desai said: “We firmly reject the appellant’s case that Imatinib Mesylate is a new product and the outcome of an invention beyond the Zimmermann [original] patent.”

The Bench said that the patent application contains a “clear and unambiguous averment” that all the therapeutic qualities of the modified form, for which the patent was applied, “are possessed” by the original version.

Maybe he means this? Obama relents on drone guidelines details

Probably referring to the recent attack helicopters shooting blanks in downtown Miami

Maybe he means this? Obama relents on drone guidelines details

Indeed; I've had people point out 'Japan's running just fine having shut down ALL their nuclear plants!'. Just recently I read an article* that pointed out that the cost of the oil and natural gas to replace their nuclear plants pushed Japan into a trade deficit for the first time in decades. Now, it didn't have a mention of cost, and the global downturn probably plays a factor, but I found an estimate of $100M/day, 4.5M barrels of oil. Since Oil is pretty price-inflexible, that 4.5M barrels of oil is coming out of the rest of the world - raising the price of our gasoline, diesel, and other petroleum products.

LNG imports: increased 18% in volume, 52% in value, to $67B. Cost to the Japanese: $23B USD equivalent.

Not the most impartial site, but it quotes $55B in additional fossil fuel imports. It actually says the shutdowns were a bigger cause than all the damage from the Earthquake & Tsunami.

For those worried about global warming - Green energy isn't ramping up to replace the nuclear power lost anytime soon, and it's led to a substantial increase in Japan's CO2 emissions. Right now Japanese consumers oppose turning the plants back on; but last I heard they're also not seeing an increase in their electric bill yet.

Finally, to DMJC - How well do you think SST Plants will do during an Alaskan Winter? Beware the 'one true power' fallacy. My goal is 40% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind, 20% other(hydro, geothermal, tidal, biomass, etc...)

*Dead tree publication, Stars & Stripes, Aug 13,2012, 'Fukushima disaster studies call for regulatory reform'.

With these machines, the best water output is obtained at 50 to 70 per cent relative humidity and between 28-42 degrees Celsius. A lesser water output is produced even at 25 per cent relative humidity. Atmospheric water extractor units can be kept anywhere, but need access to fresh air, so they work best when placed by a window, or in the balcony or terrace.

Sounds to me like they'd be way expensive to run in a desert to me. Desert air rarely hits 50 percent humidity.

It always rubs me the wrong way when government spending gets systematically and broadly dissed as inefficient.

I've lived in a number of countries and, frankly, public entities seldom stroke me as materially more inefficient than large corporations. The difference is meaningful, inasfar as I've been experiencing it anyway, in only a few cases:

The first and most important is when corruption is rampant. Eg. good luck finding a lost luggage in a sub-Sahara airport if you don't tip the employee; or spending less than a whole afternoon paying for a parking ticket in Mexico if you didn't get the memo that you should tip the cop who hands you the ticket in the first place. This is virtually non-existent in western countries.

The second most important is the heightened awareness of and concern for the welfare of local communities and the environment, either because they like to get the job well done, as opposed to well enough, or due to public opposition. Eg. noone in his right mind would argue that bullet proof vests are wasteful spending for soldiers, irrespective of the subsequent PST costs; and a public entity would need to surmount a mountain of opposition before building a highway or setting train tracks in a wild life reserve. This is virtually non-existent outside of western countries.

Another is silly procedures, but it's arguably not the public servants' fault, and large corporations are notoriously full of them too.

Staff that doesn't give a shit about anything is yet another, but I found this to be mostly cultural: when mostly true, it also holds mostly true at the population level. This is particularly pronounced in developing countries.

The next, last and arguably least important is when powerful public unions successfully bargained for lavish benefits. Eg. a public servant cannot get sacked in France even if he spends most of his day pretending to work. Frankly though, most public servants I've met or interacted with over the years were just as professional as the next guy working for a large corporation -- which is to say, not very, but being a public servant has little to do with it. The real difference is that you're forced to interact with public servants, and you typically do so in times of hardship. (If you ever had to deal with an unscrupulous insurance company, you probably know what I mean.)

Your mileage varies per country, obviously. French public servants, for instance, are very self-entitled and often mocked by the French as the epitome of inefficiency; a quick tour in a Mexican administration, however, will make any French person (correctly) praise his home country's adminstration as one of the most efficient in the world. Much the same could be said of the UK and German ones, minus the public servants' attitude. The US one is competent by my standards, as is the Canadian one. Neither are very friendly nor helpful, but they get things done efficiently. The Mexican one, an absolute mess by any standard, actually shines when compared to the (understaffed) Indian one. And don't even get me started on African countries.

Anyway, my point is this: mock your administration all you want; complain about its costliness; pinpoint its uselesness; but keep in mind that people in most other countries would envy it as a model of efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

There... I fed the troll.

I would not be so sure.

I am sure. China just clarified our budget priorities for us yesterday. Last week China helped with our diplomatic prerogatives.

In the next few days we may have a budget deal. Where do you think Treasury will be looking for the next few hundred billion of financing? Or rather, how many hours will it take for Geithner to arrive in Beijing (for the third time) after the limit gets bumped?

We're not going to be engaging anyone in any aerospace competitions. Not merely because we can't afford it, but also because they would rather we not.

Ambassador David C. Mulford — the man who sent many of the secret U.S. embassy cables accessed by The Hindu through WikiLeaks — put to rest any doubts on the veracity of their contents on Friday, stating that “certainly the reports from the U.S. embassy [in New Delhi] in general are accurate reports.”

http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article1551181.ece

If WikiLeaks faked a single cable, especially one as easily checked as you say this one is, they would eventually be found out. That would give anyone looking to dismiss the rest of the cables just the excuse they need.

This is great news for the coconut pickers who climb to great heights in unsafe conditions, often putting their lives in grave danger! http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/agriculture/article406266.ece

c6gunnr wrote:

Ok, then everybody is wrong. [wikipedia.org]

The Wikipedia article seems heavily slanted. It diligently lists all the problems the UN inspectors faced, but avoids mentioning their main conclusion. Let's go to some sources.
The Hindu:

"Contrary to Western intelligence claims about Iraq's supposed arms capability in the run-up to the 2003 invasion, the fact was that Saddam Hussein had destroyed his weapons of mass destruction and dismantled the infrastructure after the 1991 Gulf War, according to the United Nations' former chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix. Giving evidence before the Iraq inquiry committee here on Tuesday, Mr. Blix was emphatic that Iraq had “no weapons” by 2003."

The Independent (UK):

"The Government's case for war against Saddam Hussein was undermined further yesterday when the former United Nations chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, said that Iraq had probably destroyed its most deadly weapons of mass destruction more than a decade ago.

Mr Blix, who retired in June, told the Australian state broadcaster ABC: "I'm certainly more and more to the conclusion that Iraq has, as they maintained, destroyed all, almost, of what they had in the summer of 1991. [...]

Mr Blix's remarks are in contrast to the claims made by London and Washington in the run-up to the war that Saddam was harbouring a large cache of deadly weapons, which could be deployed easily and quickly.[...]

Another weapons expert and former UN inspector, David Albright, said last night that the Iraq Survey Group had apparently failed to find anything significant. They are "not finding the kinds of things the administration expected to find, large quantities of biological and chemical weapons or evidence that they were destroyed prior to the war", he said."

c6gunnr wrote:

Ah, yes, that hotbed of political insight, The Onion. Well clearly I must be wrong, then.

You're missing the point. The question was if people, outside of the Bush administration, doubted the claims of WMDs even before the war. And they did. To many outsiders, it was perfectly clear how ridiculous the claims were.

In fairness to the submitter, the article writer made it up too (as do quite a few others)

I can't seem to find the original source (AP I assume) but here's a version substituting "SMS" for "Blackberry"

Iranian protestors are mainly centered in the cities, so maybe they are not so bad.. On the other hand some parts of India still has train robbers targetting freight transport.

As mentioned by other /.ters india has been working on nuclear reactors using thorium fuel for quite some time.

"India is estimated to have a reserve of 2.25 lakh tonnes of Thorium, with an electricity generation potential of 1,55,000 gig watt-years, against just 61,000 tonnes of uranium, with an electricity generation potential of up to 42,000 gig watt-years only. The use of thorium for power generation had been a dream of the country's nuclear scientists as it would help make the nuclear programme all the more autonomous." ~ http://www.hindu.com/2007/01/05/stories/2007010511500100.htm

Among other things, nuclear scientists in India also believe that nuclear power will be the "primary source of power for the future":

"Right now we are talking of nuclear power as an electricity source, and it will be an important electricity source for a long time to come. Very soon we will reach a situation where the energy source, such as oil and gas, will be in short supply. As our energy use grows, we will have to tap all our energy resources such as hydro, coal, oil and gas. It looks to me that there will be a stress on all these sources.

Our nuclear energy sources, particularly from thorium, are vast. Our technology focus at the moment is how to generate electricity from thorium. What about a point of time when the general energy sources are stretched? The question then is from where will we get the energy for transportation? From where will we get the energy for industrial processes? Just as we get crude oil, and refine it into energy products such as petrol, diesel, kerosene, naphtha, etc., I think the day is not far off when we will have to look at nuclear energy as the primary energy source.

So the question is, using nuclear energy can you produce hydrogen? Or can you facilitate pyro-chemical or pyro-metallurgical processes. In all these, the important thing is the temperature at which the energy is available. In the PHWRs, you get energy at 300C, and in the FBR at 500C. But for other applications - energy conversion applications - you require energy at 1000C. This is a technology development challenge and this is something we have begun doing (Compact High Temperature Reactor) so that in the years to come, we can look at nuclear energy as a primary energy source.

So, the first thrust area is to increase the share of nuclear power in the electricity generated. The second is to expand the source of nuclear power as the primary energy source. The third is what we can do in the area of agriculture. Thanks to the Green Revolution, we are better placed in agricultural output. Even so, oilseeds and pulses are areas that require more attention. That is where the strong point of BARC is - the mutant seeds developed in BARC. It is more focussed on oilseeds and pulses." ~ http://www.thehindu.com/fline/fl2104/stories/20040227003810000.htm

I haven't touched yesterday's copy of my paper (the hindu)

That explains why your post has anger rather than surprise. If you read the paper, you would be surprised that Hindu didn't report it, nor did any Indian news paper.