Why would anyone in Russia want to build a washing machine if Russia has thousands of miles of land border with China, including several railways? It makes much more business sense to focus on what you do best and what offers the highest return on investment. If that bomb will be offered on an international market (and there is no reason to not do so) then the margin on that would be quite higher than on a washing machine.
It's just funny, and no, it is not correct. The russian word for that thing is "otechestvo", it has neutral gender and can be loosely translated as "land of our fathers", so the best English match is "fatherland", just like in German.
Sorry to hear about your game coding experience, sounds awful and I never worked anywhere close to that. No, I am not a manager at the moment, and have no plans to become one any time soon. I just design embedded systems - hardware and software. I leave management to managers.
Let's be clear about this, if us wage slaves who have no lives are an "overpriced" commodity, it's because an apartment in the big city is $2000 per month and health benefits are $300-$600 per month, more if there's a family.
Yes, of course. You can not live on $10 per day any more than I can or anyone else. But would you agree to work for $500/mo if your rent would be $50 and you can ride a bicycle to work, or a moped? And assuming everything else being proportionally cheaper? That's what they have over there.
Or think on another subject. Why does it cost $46,000 to study for one year at MIT? This is also your cost driver. Answer: because it is profitable and because the students pay. The more you pay the higher the price of everything will be driven because it directly translates into profits of companies who provide the service or the product.
So yes, it is expensive to live in the USA (or in Japan, or in some other countries.) This also makes citizens of those countries more expensive to hire, and on the global labor market they will be getting fewer offers. Not none at all, of course - good skills and good experience are worth a lot - but all things considered, a common green graduate from a generic US university might have a hard time competing with a talented green graduate from a good Indian university.
I'm not an economist to suggest an exit from this situation, but one clear issue here is that the global labor market is not matched with free movement of labor. That is if you want to treat every programmer on the planet equally. Or, to take the opposite side in this subject, you may want to close the borders and maintain your country's economy within those borders. That would be the traditional way. But this way is contrary to businesses' desire to increase profits by buying the cheapest labor possible. What I say here is that you are hoisted on the free market's petard, and not because free market is defective but because *you* don't have a choice to live in India but your employer has a choice to hire a coder there. You are forced to spend $1,200 or whatever on your rental apartment.
It's midnight already, but a couple of comments to that:
if you're saying that there are more good programmers because there are more programmers in general, then it also follows that there are more mediocre and bad programmers. Sorting the good from the bad on a different continent in a different culture is anything but trivial.
It's not that difficult if you use a well-designed system of tests to weed out the 90% that aren't worth the interview. The remaining, interesting candidates can be looked at by local managers who know the people, the culture and can make correct decisions. Those would be the same managers who'd be working with the hired people, so they have their own interests in this game, and they are not likely to hire complete idiots.
your argument seems a bit circular. The original "problem" is whether North American programmers won't be able to find jobs because they're outsourced. In a way, you're saying it's easier to find good programmers in India/China because it's harder to find good programmers in North America.
Yes, it is naturally circular, as many processes are. Social processes are even more subject to that because they are often driven by emotions. For example, the outsourcing started too early, as a hope to reduce the costs. This resulted in loss of local programming jobs. This resulted in loss of prestige of the profession. This resulted in shortage of local programmers. This resulted in confirmation of the initial - and incorrect at that time - premise that there aren't enough programmers in the USA to serve the needs of the growing industry. Feedback loops with phase shifts - which we observe here - are the core subject of control systems analysis, and this social development is a perfect example of it.
many of the best Indian and Chinese programmers ARE in North America!
Yes, and they have now better employment opportunities than any local coder because they are better, and because they can work in either market (in the USA as star programmers, or in their native countries as star managers of large projects; they'd be welcome in either role, and probably returning as managers is quite attractive to many - consider that many have 6-year H1B visas and have to leave in any case.)
But on what are you basing your assertion that developers in India or China are more competent than developers in North America?
On the following. Let's take as an axiom that 5% of all graduates are great, 10% good and 85% mediocre. Then it follows that the more graduates a country produces the more, in absolute terms, will be great. Then it makes perfect sense to set up a camp in the large target country and select those 5% that are the best. If you do it in your smaller home country (the USA, for example) then you end up with fewer great developers. And since you'd ideally want all your developers to be great, it makes sense to look for them where they are (and not where you are:-)
Or, in fishing terms, if you want to catch the best fish you need to go where enough of excellent fish lives; you still get the same percentage per bite, but if they bite every second you just release the weaklings and keep the good catch. If you try the same method in a sinkhole in your backyard you'd need to wait a week for any one bite, and besides the logic tells that the black cat is not in the dark room, however long you search for it.
To further elaborate: what makes US programmers, in long term, better than Indian or Chinese programmers? In my opinion, nothing that can't be fixed by a decade or two of self-improving education. Then you have two equally qualified pools of candidates, one may be more expensive and another may be cheaper, but when the cheaper one is also a larger one then that may determine where you will be hiring your developers. On the other hand, local programmers may be more convenient to work with. On the third hand, in modern [global] economy it does not really matter where you and your coders are - it's no longer the local shopkeeper Bill hiring the local glazier John to fix his store front; it's more like "The Collective would like this database project started, make it so." - totally decoupled from the locale.
unless our projects are managed at the regional level
Yes, that is necessary (I commented on that in another post, just above this one.) Also when hiring in India and China you will get access to wider selection of specialists. Today they could be a little green, but they will be better in a decade or so. Also, try to hire in the USA for a specific skillset and you will immediately find that most applicants are just not fit for the job. I used to run ads for months, get hundreds of replies, and not a single one who could be hired and expected to be productive from day zero. Most applicants were just web designers, and I needed hard-real-time embedded people! I would rather get thousands of replies and hire five people out of them - but in this limited market I get to hire nobody.
Building software is about communication and change management. Putting 5,000 miles, 9 time zones and the history of human civilizations language and MOST importantly culture differences on top of your standard business risk is retarded.
Well, that would mean that all those transnational corporations that span the globe just can't possibly exist. A bee can't fly according to the theory. But it does fly in practice! There are indeed cultural differences and time zones involved, but as matter of fact soon I may need to work with people in Europe, so it would be no difference to me to work with people in India, for example - same difference, just the opposite sign.
And once the company overcomes this difference and equips itself with modern video and audio communication means you suddenly discover that you don't care any more where people are - you can discuss matters with them just as easily as if they are next to you in the conference room. Once you are there, you are a global player. There are thousands of US companies that broke that barrier; I work for one of them now.
And global companies don't need to outsource; they own that foreign piece outright. Look how Microsoft does it - they build wholly owned development center in Bangalore:
"As a research organization, you want to hire the best and brightest people. That's what we did in China six years ago," said Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research. "Ultimately, the work that will be going on there will be based on the people we hire."
This way MS fully controls who works on what project, and avoids the need to work with transient staff (unless they want to, of course.) This means that what you say about "internal projects" is true, but it also means that there is a simple solution to that - and a common US coder is not part of it.
The real problem with this, is that nobody is going to become competent at building software on a large scale until they understand what's happening on a medium and small scale.
Absolutely true - and currently US market forces strangle the local supply of local developers.
Corporate America and Europe are sowing the seeds of economic destruction...
Not so fast here - destruction of whose economy? If you are talking about developer's economy and his job prospects then you are right on the money. If you are talking about corporate profits then you are off the mark by a mile. You see, the current trend - which could be, and was, predicted by economists long ago - is to own the virtual and financial means of production by holding IP and factories and know-how, but allow the unwashed peasants to do all the labor. Now that I mentioned peasants, does it not look familiar? So nothing is new under the Sun, and we are back to the same ages old principle - barons own the land, and peasants work it. This is the repeating theme of more than one civilization because it is one of most stable ones, and represents an evolutionary end. You have nowhere else to go (peacefully) past that point, but once there you (as a baron) have accumulated everything. And by the way, if the peasants from that little village called "the USA" want more pay, screw them - I own plenty more peasants; the USians can either die from hunger or to accept my terms.
Software produced in any country different from the ones where the customers are suffers from substantial communications breakdowns, which leads to all sorts or problems. Language barriers are also a major issue.
You are actually confirming my point here: where is the larger market - in the USA or in India? If I were to write a wordprocessor, or even a web site for Indian audience I'd be insane to contract a US developer. There is no debate that India and China together already represent 42% of the planet's population (.in=1.136B,.cn=1.7B, total among those two countries is 2.836B, and the whole Earth's population is 6.7B and this ratio will be increasing, offset only by African nations. The world is changing, fast. The world economy will be seeing the USA just as the US economy is now looking at, say, Lithuania.
How sure of this are you, really?
Pretty sure because, teachers aside, the distribution of IQ among people is practically the same. Teachers is the only factor that may hold India back, but that is quickly becoming a non-issue because large number of Indians study in US (most US students today are foreigners) and because the skill level of teachers grows fast (the best students are always offered to stay in the university and teach, in addition to doing fun science.) I don't say India is *already* at the top, but give it ten years and US scientists may be underrepresented at top research conferences. Since the OP was wondering about his long term prospects, ten years is exactly the time frame when he will start getting really bad news.
What do you say to people who consider Linux but don't want to switch because it's different than Windows?
I would say they should stay with Windows, since they already told me what are the deciding factors. If Linux changes, or if those people assign higher weight to Linux's advantages, then they are welcome to Linux Land.
The problem with your reasoning is that people already know where what menu item is, and what it does. So they don't need to guess (and it is correct, Table / Rows is perfectly structured, and differentiates an insertion of a blank row from insertion of a picture, for example.) Myself, I don't want to chase table operations all over the menu. I tried Office 2007 a couple of times, and I couldn't use it at all. The problem for me was in the fact that from my height of an experience user I was dropped to the novice level, where I had to click on ribbon after ribbon and stare into tiny, meaningless icons trying to divine which of them does what I need. I gave up on that pretty quick, my time is expensive and I have better things to do with it.
And here is why. First of all, if you read the replies above you will see that a software analyst is not something you can claim on your resume when the ink on your diploma is still wet. And you won't get the chance to grow into the position because the entry level positions are either not common enough or just a dead end.
A more generic outlook is this. Software can be produced in any country, anywhere at all, and the only thing it requires is the competent personnel to execute the project. India and China produce more software developers in total, and proportionally more *excellent* developers. Now imagine that someone in the world (a transnational corporation, for example, which does not care where the job is done) needs to develop and write a complex software system to, say, operate a 23-legged underwater spider that is being built to fix underwater fiber cables. The company will build the hardware, and now it needs to find a software developer (a company, of course) that can provide at least 100 developers full time, at least 25 senior developers, and a proportional number of managers and other necessary overhead.
Given these example conditions, let's see which company will win the bid. A US company will be burdened with high salaries, and at the same time will not be able to provide so many competent developers (warm bodies do not count.) Ability to work *seriously* overtime is probably not there; willingness to travel and participate in testing in Philippines is probably not there either. Compare to an Indian company which can give you as many workers as you need, at fraction of the cost, and they are all best of the best. A US company would need to have some very tangible advantages to win the bid, but I can't imagine how they can win on costs. Practically the only usable story here is previous experience and the ownership of relevant intellectual property, and good luck if they have it. But a US newcomer has no chance to win the bid; and even older companies, with experience of underwater and robotic works, will face fierce competition from far more populous countries.
In other words, a US worker is overpriced on the global market, and exceptions are rare. The USA does export technology, but it is in markets that have extreme barrier of entry (airplanes, nuclear reactors, Windows OS, drugs, CPU and IC designs) or when the products are weapons. Those are the major sectors of US export (not counting food products, since they are not relevant to this discussion.) More and more of US technological output is in knowledge only, and software developers are not high enough to qualify as such.
Why all this is happening is simple. Humans and societies develop more and more knowledge and skills, and then they get to a plateau - no more intellectual growth. That's what Europe and the USA reached decades ago. During that time Chinese cast iron at home and shot intellectuals, and in India Hindus and Moslems tried to determine whose god is mightier. Physics of semiconductors and quantum effects in P-N barriers were not on the horizon there. But now the developing nations advanced, as they should, and they are quickly approaching the same knowledge plateau that US and Europe encountered earlier. That's why they are becoming competitive - their PhDs are just as smart now as any european or american PhD, and there are far more of them, and they charge far less, and the process is only unwinding out of control.
They could have taken the phones with them to be able to listen to music, maybe? My phone supports roaming but shows a warning when connecting and a symbol on the LCD, so it's very much obvious when you are going to incur charges, and you don't want to pay then you can cancel the connection before it starts.
A radio receiver has many paths over which the GSM signal can come in. For example, all modern radios have at least two intermediate frequencies, some have more. Each of those IF paths has gain. The antenna input is isolated from the first IF, but if the source is local it can bypass the filters and directly get to the gain stages, that's when the overload occurs, and nearby mixers will take care of generating so much garbage that the rest of the receiver will be overloaded with it.
RFID chips do not emit any RF, however the site of implantation will be exposed to external RF from the reader, and the energy of the field will be converted into heat right inside the implant. So you get two effects: higher RF levels and internal heating where there is no skin to protect the living cells.
Glass is not inert; hardly anything is. Glass readily reacts with fluorides, and that is commonly used in labs and glass factories to etch markings onto the glass. Google lists a number of chemical interactions of glass; most admittedly minute, but to a molecular biologist that could be plenty to wreck a cell.
Aside from chemical effects, there are physical effects. Cells adjacent to the tag may be periodically damaged (their membranes broken) because the tag is a hard alien object in the mass of soft, flexible cells. The repair of such a damage could become uncontrollable, thus becoming a tumor.
Here is a cheerful thought for you. What if the ground crew didn't pay attention to live nukes because they were loading them day and night for, say, last two weeks?
As a more qualified poster indicated, it is unthinkable that the nuclear warheads would be even stored where any soldier can drive a forklift in, pick up a few crates and cart them out. James Bond movies are not a guide, I know, but don't they *lock the doors* for example, with keys stored in locked safes of base's big brass, and with two or three keys needed together to unlock? If the storage was open (by who? a lowly ground crewman can't do that, I hope!) and accessible (like no armed guard at the doors?) then the weapons were supposed to be moved, despite what the official line is, and the fsckup is just that they were loaded on a wrong plane. That is not very encouraging.
I do not know what is mandated for handling nuclear weapons, but common sense dictates at least this:
Exact and correct paperwork confirming orders to handle the material
People trained to do the job, machinery certified for the same
Armed guard at every point where the material can be accessed
Route planning to avoid flying over highly populated areas
Fighter escort, if flying of the material is chosen
But basically at some levels of security a single person is not even allowed to handle the materials. During the Wen Ho Lee case it was published that vaults at the lab could be visited, and worked in, only by two people checking actions of each other. This is reasonable, and that's why (as I read) control rooms of ICBMs were manned by not less than two people who both must agree to launch, and on submarines a similar system is also in effect.
But in this case a bunch of nuclear weapons - which were not meant to be sent anywhere - was given to a group of people who were specially trained to work as one person, to fly like one person, to know each other and so on - to be efficient in what they do. Unless that was a random crew, which I doubt. If there was no oversight of the actions of that single, cohesive group then they could have flown the weapons anywhere, sold them to Osama, and crossed the Mexican border before anyone would have realized what happened. I of course believe that the flight crew is honest, and so it apparently is, but they *could* - and in this business, when Osama is ready to pay *anything* for a nuke - the society simply shouldn't take such an unnecessary risk. These nukes, if taken apart and reassembled by Osama's technicians, could easily start the World War III. I don't even know what would be worse to the USA - terrorists exploding a warhead in New York or exploding it in Mecca, or in New Delhi, or anywhere when a spark (of this proportion) can cause a world wide attack on everything american.
It wouldn't even occur to a normal person to mount live nuclear warheads on pylons unless you really mean to launch the missiles. Several nuclear bombs were accidentally dropped in 20th century, so now you'd be better off carrying the warheads in a secure (hermetic) container inside a cargo aircraft, with a fighter or two nearby and with sender and receiver and the pilots being briefed, instructed and trained until they are really ready. Those pilots haven't known, probably haven't trained recently, and the receiving base didn't know. If they'd have an emergency - say, an engine on fire - they could land in any civilian airport, and they could drop the "dummy" missiles if they thought it safer than carrying a fueled weapon. If they didn't know they could do anything.
In the meantime - congrats, they probably found out who went to lunch with whom last Friday, or read the Navy newsletter.
IANAS, but access to unclassified [internal] email may be an efficient source of data to a professional. Since.mil types usually put their service position in the email, it then reveals who is who on the inside - that is clearly more than a common spy can conclude just by looking at people as they go to and from work at Pentagon. And if you get any hint of improper behavior in those emails then you have something to discuss in private with your new prospective source...
Slashdot Mirror
You are looking for this :-)
Why would anyone in Russia want to build a washing machine if Russia has thousands of miles of land border with China, including several railways? It makes much more business sense to focus on what you do best and what offers the highest return on investment. If that bomb will be offered on an international market (and there is no reason to not do so) then the margin on that would be quite higher than on a washing machine.
It's just funny, and no, it is not correct. The russian word for that thing is "otechestvo", it has neutral gender and can be loosely translated as "land of our fathers", so the best English match is "fatherland", just like in German.
This is not correct; there is no such rule, and you can find words of all genders for inanimate objects (kamen':m, bomba:f, okno:n)
Yes the word for a bomb has feminine gender, this readily disproves your theory.
Let's be clear about this, if us wage slaves who have no lives are an "overpriced" commodity, it's because an apartment in the big city is $2000 per month and health benefits are $300-$600 per month, more if there's a family.
Yes, of course. You can not live on $10 per day any more than I can or anyone else. But would you agree to work for $500/mo if your rent would be $50 and you can ride a bicycle to work, or a moped? And assuming everything else being proportionally cheaper? That's what they have over there.
Or think on another subject. Why does it cost $46,000 to study for one year at MIT? This is also your cost driver. Answer: because it is profitable and because the students pay. The more you pay the higher the price of everything will be driven because it directly translates into profits of companies who provide the service or the product.
So yes, it is expensive to live in the USA (or in Japan, or in some other countries.) This also makes citizens of those countries more expensive to hire, and on the global labor market they will be getting fewer offers. Not none at all, of course - good skills and good experience are worth a lot - but all things considered, a common green graduate from a generic US university might have a hard time competing with a talented green graduate from a good Indian university.
I'm not an economist to suggest an exit from this situation, but one clear issue here is that the global labor market is not matched with free movement of labor. That is if you want to treat every programmer on the planet equally. Or, to take the opposite side in this subject, you may want to close the borders and maintain your country's economy within those borders. That would be the traditional way. But this way is contrary to businesses' desire to increase profits by buying the cheapest labor possible. What I say here is that you are hoisted on the free market's petard, and not because free market is defective but because *you* don't have a choice to live in India but your employer has a choice to hire a coder there. You are forced to spend $1,200 or whatever on your rental apartment.
if you're saying that there are more good programmers because there are more programmers in general, then it also follows that there are more mediocre and bad programmers. Sorting the good from the bad on a different continent in a different culture is anything but trivial.
It's not that difficult if you use a well-designed system of tests to weed out the 90% that aren't worth the interview. The remaining, interesting candidates can be looked at by local managers who know the people, the culture and can make correct decisions. Those would be the same managers who'd be working with the hired people, so they have their own interests in this game, and they are not likely to hire complete idiots.
your argument seems a bit circular. The original "problem" is whether North American programmers won't be able to find jobs because they're outsourced. In a way, you're saying it's easier to find good programmers in India/China because it's harder to find good programmers in North America.
Yes, it is naturally circular, as many processes are. Social processes are even more subject to that because they are often driven by emotions. For example, the outsourcing started too early, as a hope to reduce the costs. This resulted in loss of local programming jobs. This resulted in loss of prestige of the profession. This resulted in shortage of local programmers. This resulted in confirmation of the initial - and incorrect at that time - premise that there aren't enough programmers in the USA to serve the needs of the growing industry. Feedback loops with phase shifts - which we observe here - are the core subject of control systems analysis, and this social development is a perfect example of it.
many of the best Indian and Chinese programmers ARE in North America!
Yes, and they have now better employment opportunities than any local coder because they are better, and because they can work in either market (in the USA as star programmers, or in their native countries as star managers of large projects; they'd be welcome in either role, and probably returning as managers is quite attractive to many - consider that many have 6-year H1B visas and have to leave in any case.)
It's an allegory, green and with sharp teeth. Do not confuse with a relevant.
On the following. Let's take as an axiom that 5% of all graduates are great, 10% good and 85% mediocre. Then it follows that the more graduates a country produces the more, in absolute terms, will be great. Then it makes perfect sense to set up a camp in the large target country and select those 5% that are the best. If you do it in your smaller home country (the USA, for example) then you end up with fewer great developers. And since you'd ideally want all your developers to be great, it makes sense to look for them where they are (and not where you are :-)
Or, in fishing terms, if you want to catch the best fish you need to go where enough of excellent fish lives; you still get the same percentage per bite, but if they bite every second you just release the weaklings and keep the good catch. If you try the same method in a sinkhole in your backyard you'd need to wait a week for any one bite, and besides the logic tells that the black cat is not in the dark room, however long you search for it.
To further elaborate: what makes US programmers, in long term, better than Indian or Chinese programmers? In my opinion, nothing that can't be fixed by a decade or two of self-improving education. Then you have two equally qualified pools of candidates, one may be more expensive and another may be cheaper, but when the cheaper one is also a larger one then that may determine where you will be hiring your developers. On the other hand, local programmers may be more convenient to work with. On the third hand, in modern [global] economy it does not really matter where you and your coders are - it's no longer the local shopkeeper Bill hiring the local glazier John to fix his store front; it's more like "The Collective would like this database project started, make it so." - totally decoupled from the locale.
Yes, that is necessary (I commented on that in another post, just above this one.) Also when hiring in India and China you will get access to wider selection of specialists. Today they could be a little green, but they will be better in a decade or so. Also, try to hire in the USA for a specific skillset and you will immediately find that most applicants are just not fit for the job. I used to run ads for months, get hundreds of replies, and not a single one who could be hired and expected to be productive from day zero. Most applicants were just web designers, and I needed hard-real-time embedded people! I would rather get thousands of replies and hire five people out of them - but in this limited market I get to hire nobody.
Building software is about communication and change management. Putting 5,000 miles, 9 time zones and the history of human civilizations language and MOST importantly culture differences on top of your standard business risk is retarded.
Well, that would mean that all those transnational corporations that span the globe just can't possibly exist. A bee can't fly according to the theory. But it does fly in practice! There are indeed cultural differences and time zones involved, but as matter of fact soon I may need to work with people in Europe, so it would be no difference to me to work with people in India, for example - same difference, just the opposite sign.
And once the company overcomes this difference and equips itself with modern video and audio communication means you suddenly discover that you don't care any more where people are - you can discuss matters with them just as easily as if they are next to you in the conference room. Once you are there, you are a global player. There are thousands of US companies that broke that barrier; I work for one of them now.
And global companies don't need to outsource; they own that foreign piece outright. Look how Microsoft does it - they build wholly owned development center in Bangalore:
This way MS fully controls who works on what project, and avoids the need to work with transient staff (unless they want to, of course.) This means that what you say about "internal projects" is true, but it also means that there is a simple solution to that - and a common US coder is not part of it.
The real problem with this, is that nobody is going to become competent at building software on a large scale until they understand what's happening on a medium and small scale.
Absolutely true - and currently US market forces strangle the local supply of local developers.
Corporate America and Europe are sowing the seeds of economic destruction...
Not so fast here - destruction of whose economy? If you are talking about developer's economy and his job prospects then you are right on the money. If you are talking about corporate profits then you are off the mark by a mile. You see, the current trend - which could be, and was, predicted by economists long ago - is to own the virtual and financial means of production by holding IP and factories and know-how, but allow the unwashed peasants to do all the labor. Now that I mentioned peasants, does it not look familiar? So nothing is new under the Sun, and we are back to the same ages old principle - barons own the land, and peasants work it. This is the repeating theme of more than one civilization because it is one of most stable ones, and represents an evolutionary end. You have nowhere else to go (peacefully) past that point, but once there you (as a baron) have accumulated everything. And by the way, if the peasants from that little village called "the USA" want more pay, screw them - I own plenty more peasants; the USians can either die from hunger or to accept my terms.
You are actually confirming my point here: where is the larger market - in the USA or in India? If I were to write a wordprocessor, or even a web site for Indian audience I'd be insane to contract a US developer. There is no debate that India and China together already represent 42% of the planet's population (.in=1.136B, .cn=1.7B, total among those two countries is 2.836B, and the whole Earth's population is 6.7B and this ratio will be increasing, offset only by African nations. The world is changing, fast. The world economy will be seeing the USA just as the US economy is now looking at, say, Lithuania.
How sure of this are you, really?
Pretty sure because, teachers aside, the distribution of IQ among people is practically the same. Teachers is the only factor that may hold India back, but that is quickly becoming a non-issue because large number of Indians study in US (most US students today are foreigners) and because the skill level of teachers grows fast (the best students are always offered to stay in the university and teach, in addition to doing fun science.) I don't say India is *already* at the top, but give it ten years and US scientists may be underrepresented at top research conferences. Since the OP was wondering about his long term prospects, ten years is exactly the time frame when he will start getting really bad news.
I would say they should stay with Windows, since they already told me what are the deciding factors. If Linux changes, or if those people assign higher weight to Linux's advantages, then they are welcome to Linux Land.
The problem with your reasoning is that people already know where what menu item is, and what it does. So they don't need to guess (and it is correct, Table / Rows is perfectly structured, and differentiates an insertion of a blank row from insertion of a picture, for example.) Myself, I don't want to chase table operations all over the menu. I tried Office 2007 a couple of times, and I couldn't use it at all. The problem for me was in the fact that from my height of an experience user I was dropped to the novice level, where I had to click on ribbon after ribbon and stare into tiny, meaningless icons trying to divine which of them does what I need. I gave up on that pretty quick, my time is expensive and I have better things to do with it.
0! equals 1, so the error message does not mean what the coder thought it means.
A more generic outlook is this. Software can be produced in any country, anywhere at all, and the only thing it requires is the competent personnel to execute the project. India and China produce more software developers in total, and proportionally more *excellent* developers. Now imagine that someone in the world (a transnational corporation, for example, which does not care where the job is done) needs to develop and write a complex software system to, say, operate a 23-legged underwater spider that is being built to fix underwater fiber cables. The company will build the hardware, and now it needs to find a software developer (a company, of course) that can provide at least 100 developers full time, at least 25 senior developers, and a proportional number of managers and other necessary overhead.
Given these example conditions, let's see which company will win the bid. A US company will be burdened with high salaries, and at the same time will not be able to provide so many competent developers (warm bodies do not count.) Ability to work *seriously* overtime is probably not there; willingness to travel and participate in testing in Philippines is probably not there either. Compare to an Indian company which can give you as many workers as you need, at fraction of the cost, and they are all best of the best. A US company would need to have some very tangible advantages to win the bid, but I can't imagine how they can win on costs. Practically the only usable story here is previous experience and the ownership of relevant intellectual property, and good luck if they have it. But a US newcomer has no chance to win the bid; and even older companies, with experience of underwater and robotic works, will face fierce competition from far more populous countries.
In other words, a US worker is overpriced on the global market, and exceptions are rare. The USA does export technology, but it is in markets that have extreme barrier of entry (airplanes, nuclear reactors, Windows OS, drugs, CPU and IC designs) or when the products are weapons. Those are the major sectors of US export (not counting food products, since they are not relevant to this discussion.) More and more of US technological output is in knowledge only, and software developers are not high enough to qualify as such.
Why all this is happening is simple. Humans and societies develop more and more knowledge and skills, and then they get to a plateau - no more intellectual growth. That's what Europe and the USA reached decades ago. During that time Chinese cast iron at home and shot intellectuals, and in India Hindus and Moslems tried to determine whose god is mightier. Physics of semiconductors and quantum effects in P-N barriers were not on the horizon there. But now the developing nations advanced, as they should, and they are quickly approaching the same knowledge plateau that US and Europe encountered earlier. That's why they are becoming competitive - their PhDs are just as smart now as any european or american PhD, and there are far more of them, and they charge far less, and the process is only unwinding out of control.
You probably could buy a small ISP in Mexico for that much money :-)
They could have taken the phones with them to be able to listen to music, maybe? My phone supports roaming but shows a warning when connecting and a symbol on the LCD, so it's very much obvious when you are going to incur charges, and you don't want to pay then you can cancel the connection before it starts.
A radio receiver has many paths over which the GSM signal can come in. For example, all modern radios have at least two intermediate frequencies, some have more. Each of those IF paths has gain. The antenna input is isolated from the first IF, but if the source is local it can bypass the filters and directly get to the gain stages, that's when the overload occurs, and nearby mixers will take care of generating so much garbage that the rest of the receiver will be overloaded with it.
You need some feedback to learn what you detected right and wrong.
They can't make me buy, though. If such views become statistically significant it might be a clue to some in {RI,MP}AA.
As a more qualified poster indicated, it is unthinkable that the nuclear warheads would be even stored where any soldier can drive a forklift in, pick up a few crates and cart them out. James Bond movies are not a guide, I know, but don't they *lock the doors* for example, with keys stored in locked safes of base's big brass, and with two or three keys needed together to unlock? If the storage was open (by who? a lowly ground crewman can't do that, I hope!) and accessible (like no armed guard at the doors?) then the weapons were supposed to be moved, despite what the official line is, and the fsckup is just that they were loaded on a wrong plane. That is not very encouraging.
But basically at some levels of security a single person is not even allowed to handle the materials. During the Wen Ho Lee case it was published that vaults at the lab could be visited, and worked in, only by two people checking actions of each other. This is reasonable, and that's why (as I read) control rooms of ICBMs were manned by not less than two people who both must agree to launch, and on submarines a similar system is also in effect.
But in this case a bunch of nuclear weapons - which were not meant to be sent anywhere - was given to a group of people who were specially trained to work as one person, to fly like one person, to know each other and so on - to be efficient in what they do. Unless that was a random crew, which I doubt. If there was no oversight of the actions of that single, cohesive group then they could have flown the weapons anywhere, sold them to Osama, and crossed the Mexican border before anyone would have realized what happened. I of course believe that the flight crew is honest, and so it apparently is, but they *could* - and in this business, when Osama is ready to pay *anything* for a nuke - the society simply shouldn't take such an unnecessary risk. These nukes, if taken apart and reassembled by Osama's technicians, could easily start the World War III. I don't even know what would be worse to the USA - terrorists exploding a warhead in New York or exploding it in Mecca, or in New Delhi, or anywhere when a spark (of this proportion) can cause a world wide attack on everything american.
It wouldn't even occur to a normal person to mount live nuclear warheads on pylons unless you really mean to launch the missiles. Several nuclear bombs were accidentally dropped in 20th century, so now you'd be better off carrying the warheads in a secure (hermetic) container inside a cargo aircraft, with a fighter or two nearby and with sender and receiver and the pilots being briefed, instructed and trained until they are really ready. Those pilots haven't known, probably haven't trained recently, and the receiving base didn't know. If they'd have an emergency - say, an engine on fire - they could land in any civilian airport, and they could drop the "dummy" missiles if they thought it safer than carrying a fueled weapon. If they didn't know they could do anything.
IANAS, but access to unclassified [internal] email may be an efficient source of data to a professional. Since .mil types usually put their service position in the email, it then reveals who is who on the inside - that is clearly more than a common spy can conclude just by looking at people as they go to and from work at Pentagon. And if you get any hint of improper behavior in those emails then you have something to discuss in private with your new prospective source...