America is a rich country with a free and good education system so every non retarded person is qualified for skilled labor. Farming is inherently low value added unskilled labor best suited to developing nations. Why does America even have farms? The land would be better used as nature reserves , recreational parks and new subdivisions for people to live in so that they wouldnt need to live as crowded as in New York and San Francisco. Food can be imported much cheaper and our taxes could be reduced a lot as the government wouldnt have to subsidize farming or research into farming machines. This is just another example of large farming lobbies using their lobbying power to make the rest of the population pay for an outmoded way of life. And to anybody who crys wolf about food security I say get serious - do you really think any third world country will try to hold back food from a country with the strongest military in the world as well as one which controls the world economy through its control of the dollar?
How about having your monitor OS being replaced with one with a backdoor built into it which detects whenever signals are being sent to a virtual nic and copies the data to another ip address on another nic? Not something MS wants to be supporting for a host of naive users
Bad things can happen when you virtualize. Corporate users understand this and moreover have their own IT people to support this. On the other hand if end users virtualize Vista basic and then face problems they will be burning up the Microsoft support lines and pretty soon the amount spent on support will be more than the cost of the basic edition. Given this scenario MS has two options - price all versions the same as premium and build in the cost of extensive support into the price or have separately priced versions with a cheaper version for people who just want to net surf . I believe MS is doing the right thing by having a cheap version which they restrict so they dont have to provide a lot of support and hence can afford to sell cheap instead of pricing everything expensively just so a few cheapskate nerds who want to virtualize but are too cheap to buy the expensive version will not badmouth them. Besides why not just Linux KVM if you are into virtualization. Except for the virtual shared memory Vista Virtualization has virtually (pardon the pun) nothing which Linux doesnt have.
Your problem is that you keep confusing the economic system of communism with the corrupt mutant forms of communism which arose in the 20th century as a result of scarcity and external American pressures (people do crazy things when they have to spend 24 hours worrying what the CIA is going to do next to make their life miserable). If you want to look at successful communism look at USA of the 60s and 70s and the trade union movement which afforded people with basic skills like steel workers, auto workers , dock workers a very decent standard of living. Now that USA is becoming a true capitalist country the union movement is dying out and the standard of living at the bottom of the scale keeps sinking while that at the top of the scale keeps rising.
Just how many multiple fatality accidents have the Russians have had in the last 20 years. None. NASA has lost two Space Shuttles. I would say the Russian program is more reliable.
Not yet maybe but once the world has developed to a post scarcity level there is only so much you can motivate people through images of even bigger cars and mansions. Most people dont want huge cars and mansions so have no interests in pissing away their youth on trying to do startups so where else will you get your innovation. It would come from the pride of doing a good job. As for jobs which have no scope for pride like collecting garbage we should be actively automating those instead of hoping there will always be some poor third world countries to send poor immigrants to do those jobs for us. Eventually even the poorest of countries of Africa will reach a living wage level and at that time people will have to outgrow the culture of greed that is capitalism.
In post scarcity societies people will work at what interests them so the job should be one of the most interesting parts of the day not something to get away from so pride of doing a good job should not be rare. The open source movement is a clear indicator that pride as a motivator as opposed to greed as a motivator does work for people who are not struggling to make a living.
At our current level of moral development communism does not work as people are still driven by greed and selfishness and capitalism is based on pure greed. So for now communism has failed. But I have no doubt that when we have developed morally enough to be able to agree to communism without coercion it would work much better than capitalism. The open source software movement is a clear example of communism working and working very well. Just because some people used jackboots to implement communism and the US demonized it doesnt mean communism is not a good idea per se just like democracy is not a bad idea even though trying to implement it in Iraq has been a mess. And as far as efficiency of systems go central planning wins hands down any day compared to the amount of waste in a free market. A free market may produce more but that is at the cost of everyone working like crazy and a few of them getting rich while the others piss their lives away. Under communism people had loads of free time to spend with their families as years of effort were not pissed away in startups which failed.
Communism works very well. Ask China or for that matter the fact that the USSR an economy 10 times smaller than USA could compete toe to toe with USA for 50 years proves that communism is much more efficient than capitalism. Communism just doesnt work well when a huge economy like the USA is trying to destroy you and you have to spend all your resources on defense rather than on the benefit of the people. Most rich capitalist countries became rich (under monarchy or as feudal or colonial powers) before they became capitalist . On the other hand there are a number of countires like China, Yugoslavia,Cuba,Russia for that matter who have successfully used communism to pull themselves from developing to developed status. On the other hand most newly freed African, Latin American or Asian countries which tried to use capitalism have ended up as cronist corrupt dictatorships
The fact that the USA let the Russians know they had nuke proof bunkers meant the Russians spent gobs of money making stronger and more powerful nukes to burst those bunkers instead of concentrating merely on say maybe fire engines (which are a lot cheaper to manufacture)
Actually communism is a much more efficient economic system. In capitalism your motivation is to make money so you will do just the bare minimum to be able to sell your product.(ala Microsoft) In communism you know your basic needs will be met and you wont be making more money by sending out a garbage product faster. Once money does not matter anymore all that matters is the satisfaction of having done a good job and created a perfect product as well as the non monetary recognition from your peers of having done a good job. So under communism you would create higher quality products even though you personally dont get any economic benefit from it (ala the open source software movement) The reason communism failed is communism only works when the entire world is communist. If you have a capitalist system in coexistence you will always have images of a few very wealthy capitalists in other countries which will make your people totally resentfull of communism . Every Tom Dick and Harry will be thinking that if only they had capitalism they could be the rich ones and the rest would be their gardeners when it is more likely they will end up as their gardeners. Marx's initial treatise makes it very clear that communism can only work if all the nations are communist which is why at the beginning the Commintern was so active in fomenting Communist revolutions everywhere. Even the limited form of communism that the USSR had was much more efficient than capitalism. The proof is that Russia - a frozen wasteland with about the same amount of economic wherewithal as Canada could hold its own against USA for almost 50 years when the USA had 50 times more farmland , 10 times an economy and 3 times a population. If USA and ISSR had been remotely been matched in resources the higher efficiency of communism would have clearly won.
Basically human beings have two motivations fear and pride. Capitalism works on the fear of ending up on the streets and starving if you dont do a good job, communism works on the pride of doing a good job even though you dont need to and the state will make sure you have enough to eat and a place to stay. You can choose which you prefer. The only drawbacks of communism is that it fails to account for another two human drives greed and envy (of people on TV from other countries). A large number of countries have pushed their way from poverty to developed status using communism- Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, Yugoslavia, most of eastern Europe while capitalism has mostly created corrupt dictatorships in latin America and Africa. All the successfull capitalist countries got rich first under monarchy, feudalism or colonialism before they adopted modern capitalism. Capitalism seems to be a bad choice for making the transition from poor to rich.
The thing about having 50 nukes is those 50 can be taken out in a first strike with nukes and then you are naked and open to blackmail. You need to have so many that the enemy cannot count them with any certainty and cant take them all out. Unfortunately this means the enemy will build more to be able to take out all your nukes in a bigger first strike and you have to build more in turn....
The USA bluffed them into spending their way into bankruptcy and collapse with all these stories of super weapons and facilities that the USA was supposed to be developing and the Russians had to match dollar for ruble. Well it turns out most of these facilities were junk just like Star Wars and the manned space program. The Russians had the more reliable manned program (Soyuz) all along but got demoralized from all the talk about how capitalism can make everything cheaper and better and they just gave up. I guess we should thank Hollywood for our victory in the Cold War more than the Pentagon or the White House.
The typical college entrance exams I took had 4 choices each and 4 points for a correct answer and -1 for a wrong answer. The thing was in a lot of the cases you may not know the correct answer but if you know something about the subject 1 or 2 of the choices are obviously wrong . Now if you eliminate those and guess amongst the rest your chances are much higher than simply not answering a question you don't know the answer to. Mathematically with 2 choices eliminated you have a.5 chance of guessing right so an expected value of 4*.5=2 -1*.5=.5 = 1.5 as opposed to 0 for not attempting. I think this kind of guessing is fair as you are getting rewarded for your partial knowledge which lets you eliminate at least the nonsense solution.
Anyone with a BS even in Biology or Geology or anything not even remotely connected to computers has spent 4 years at college, done numerous assignments for which they have had to look up information from sources like libraries, textbooks,notes and nowadays websites. Such a person is more than capable of doing some online research to figure out which is better from the various benchmarks available online. If you are not and really do have a BS I have to conclude you spent your entire 4 years only at keg parties and never submitted an honest assignment. Either you were on a football scholarship (do you get football scholarships for CS?) or your daddy made a large contribution to the college to get you your BS.
If this guy has a BS in Computers and needs Vista performance index to decide what computer to buy I seriously doubt the quality of a US education. No wonder we need H1Bs to come and run our companies. But seriously I think hes bluffing - noone with a real CS degree is that stupid. Its this kind of talk which gives US Engineers a bad rep.
Dude most of the things he talked about are taught in any decent Web Search or Machine Learning course. He is not disclosing any secrets and Page Rank is actually a 5 day homework assignment not a life's work. Google has gone far beyond Page Rank and Page Rank is just the dummy Google likes to wave about so that people are busy trying to beat Page Rank and not their real classifiers. And classifiers are dime a dozen. Tying them up with efficient network and database resources is Google's key contribution. Rest assured the reason Google is doing well is kept pretty secret. (Hint: Its the database and network algos which allow the maintenance of huge databases and indexes in a distributed manner). BTW If you dont believe Page Rank is a HW assignment look at Dr mooney's course page here http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~mooney/ir-course/
With the coming of the Internet there is too much information available and people are drowning in Information. This changes the value that newspapers can provide. Now the value of newspapers is not that they can bring news to us rather they can filter out useless news i.e. the editorial function becomes the value proposition rather than the journalistic function. When I do a Google news search I already know what I am looking for so basically I already know the news I just want details. This is not as interesting as reading a newspaper where I may come across many unrelated news items I had never even heard off. This expands my horizons. Now the newspaper doesnt need to be on paper it can be online but it needs to be an aggregate of different news articles and opinion pieces (pretty much what Slashdot is and also the reason its so popular). So if Newspapers want to survive in the future they have to become like Slashdot and superspecialize - we already have news for nerds but somebody could turn a current newspaper into news for artists or news for bankers (maybe WSJ already does that) or even a news for general man. We could even have aggregators with liberal or conservative biases and it would be very much like the early days of newspapers where a newspaper had a point of view(just like blogs). Whatever happens the traditional newspaper where you just collect information from different wire services and print it together is going to be dead soon.
Most education in India is carried out in English so regardless of first language anyone at IIT will probably be a better English speaker than the general Slashdot Reader. However that doesnt prevent people from making silly mistakes while typing fast on Slashdot. I mean the Slashdot entry is probably the least important portion of that persons day so lay off on the Grammar Nazism.
I dont believe those numbers. Are you saying IITK has a better faculty student ratio than MIT. Thats very hard to believe given that IITK is not even the top engineering college in India (that title oscillates between IIT Bombay and IIT Delhi) and definitely not the the top research instititute - that honor belongs to Indian Institute of Science Bangalore. Not many in the west hear about IISc as it does not have any undergraduate programs only postgradute research so there is no large population like the IIT B.Engg population working in US industry but if you want to do hard core research in India either you go work for the Army (DRDO), space (ISRO), Atomic establishment(DAE) or you go to IISc. There may be a few others like Indian Statistical Institute(ISI) which built the first Indian computer back in the 50s but the IITs are definitely not premier research institutes. The job of the IITs is to churn out large numbers of well trained Engineers not to carry out Fundamental research.
There is nothing in the constititution about immigration laws. Immigration laws were an unconstitutional addition in 1882 the Chinese exclusion Act - a blatantly racist act. Before that there were no laws preventing anyone in the world from coming to America and as long as they followed American laws they were Americans. Since its not even constitutional to have immigration laws on a national basis how can you have it between states?
However free the market be people are not equal (unless you believe in Communism or Christianity). Every person has a different level of ability and is able to do a different jobs. Jobs which can be done by a large number of people will always pay less than jobs that can be done by only a smaller number of people. The AMA might be artificially restricting the market by say preventing H1Bs being used to hire doctors whithout forcing them to do another degree in the US but the fact reamins even if every doctor in the world was free to practice in the US doctors would still get paid more than the guy who puts up sheet rock or the guy who administers unix servers. Why? Because the doctor could put up sheet rock or administer servers if he put his mind to it but the sheet rock installer or the network admin could never do the doctors job. Yes there is abuse of power at CxO levels but the solution in a free market is to let these companies go bankrupt and let them be taken over by Indian Outsourcing companies whose CEOs live in India and dont make millions of dollars. The free market can deal with most situations but there is no guarantee it will deal with it in way which preserves your standard of living.
What you dont understand is that in the US and in Europe the main product grown by farmers is not Corn wheat or in fact any plant. The main harvest of farmers is subsidies. As long as they have the land they can harvest subsidies from the rest of the population. This is why the cost of land seems artificially high. It would be high if you were considering the productive capaciity of the land to grow crops but when you look at its capacity to grow susbsidies suddenly the high cost of land becomes understandable. Frankly agriculture being a low skilled job has no place in developed economies. However governments after WW2 and its destruction of international shipping have a fear psychosis about becoming dependent on food imports. Hence they want to sustain a home based farming community. The only way to do this in an industrialized economy is via subsidies as otherwise the land is going to shift over to other more productive use. Now whether this is a cost worth paying or not is a different debate - same as the debate on whether its worth spending millions on weapons. If you want security you pay for it - whether that be food security or miltary security.
Working independently needs a set of managerial skills which its not necessary for everyone to have. If everyone was required to run their own businesses we would still be in the age of artisans and home based factories prior to the industrial revolution. Modern society has done a division of labour between technical and managerial skills and just like managers wouldnt be generating any cash without technical workers to do the actual work , technical workers should not be expected to do the managers job as well as their own. Both types are needed in the modern economy and need to be adequately compensated. Unfortunately for the technical types under the current system managers have more pricing power. There probably is a fair solution to this problem but I dont know what it is.
Wow! What just happened here? A company wanted to return a system which was not yet installed (for whatever be their reasons) and the Fonality guys basically blackmailed the Blade CEO that if he tried to return it they would use the press to make them look bad. Do you really think any company will ever again do business with Fonality? CEOs of customer companies dont like being given 60 sec ultimatums. The Fonality guys might have thought just because its an Indian CEO its Okay to browbeat him but boy was he wrong. Fonality employees better start brushing up their resumes as the company is looking at bankruptcy. Sure they may have a great product but guess what - its open source so the only differentiating factor they have is the quality of support and service but if they are going to be dickheads when dealing with customers they are done for. Havnt they heard the expression - " The customer is always right!" ?
Slashdot Mirror
America is a rich country with a free and good education system so every non retarded person is qualified for skilled labor. Farming is inherently low value added unskilled labor best suited to developing nations. Why does America even have farms? The land would be better used as nature reserves , recreational parks and new subdivisions for people to live in so that they wouldnt need to live as crowded as in New York and San Francisco. Food can be imported much cheaper and our taxes could be reduced a lot as the government wouldnt have to subsidize farming or research into farming machines. This is just another example of large farming lobbies using their lobbying power to make the rest of the population pay for an outmoded way of life. And to anybody who crys wolf about food security I say get serious - do you really think any third world country will try to hold back food from a country with the strongest military in the world as well as one which controls the world economy through its control of the dollar?
How about having your monitor OS being replaced with one with a backdoor built into it which detects whenever signals are being sent to a virtual nic and copies the data to another ip address on another nic? Not something MS wants to be supporting for a host of naive users
I didnt understand your alt+f4 comment. Could you show me how by doing it on your computer?
Bad things can happen when you virtualize. Corporate users understand this and moreover have their own IT people to support this. On the other hand if end users virtualize Vista basic and then face problems they will be burning up the Microsoft support lines and pretty soon the amount spent on support will be more than the cost of the basic edition. Given this scenario MS has two options - price all versions the same as premium and build in the cost of extensive support into the price or have separately priced versions with a cheaper version for people who just want to net surf . I believe MS is doing the right thing by having a cheap version which they restrict so they dont have to provide a lot of support and hence can afford to sell cheap instead of pricing everything expensively just so a few cheapskate nerds who want to virtualize but are too cheap to buy the expensive version will not badmouth them. Besides why not just Linux KVM if you are into virtualization. Except for the virtual shared memory Vista Virtualization has virtually (pardon the pun) nothing which Linux doesnt have.
Your problem is that you keep confusing the economic system of communism with the corrupt mutant forms of communism which arose in the 20th century as a result of scarcity and external American pressures (people do crazy things when they have to spend 24 hours worrying what the CIA is going to do next to make their life miserable). If you want to look at successful communism look at USA of the 60s and 70s and the trade union movement which afforded people with basic skills like steel workers, auto workers , dock workers a very decent standard of living. Now that USA is becoming a true capitalist country the union movement is dying out and the standard of living at the bottom of the scale keeps sinking while that at the top of the scale keeps rising.
Just how many multiple fatality accidents have the Russians have had in the last 20 years. None. NASA has lost two Space Shuttles. I would say the Russian program is more reliable.
Not yet maybe but once the world has developed to a post scarcity level there is only so much you can motivate people through images of even bigger cars and mansions. Most people dont want huge cars and mansions so have no interests in pissing away their youth on trying to do startups so where else will you get your innovation. It would come from the pride of doing a good job. As for jobs which have no scope for pride like collecting garbage we should be actively automating those instead of hoping there will always be some poor third world countries to send poor immigrants to do those jobs for us. Eventually even the poorest of countries of Africa will reach a living wage level and at that time people will have to outgrow the culture of greed that is capitalism.
In post scarcity societies people will work at what interests them so the job should be one of the most interesting parts of the day not something to get away from so pride of doing a good job should not be rare. The open source movement is a clear indicator that pride as a motivator as opposed to greed as a motivator does work for people who are not struggling to make a living.
At our current level of moral development communism does not work as people are still driven by greed and selfishness and capitalism is based on pure greed. So for now communism has failed. But I have no doubt that when we have developed morally enough to be able to agree to communism without coercion it would work much better than capitalism. The open source software movement is a clear example of communism working and working very well. Just because some people used jackboots to implement communism and the US demonized it doesnt mean communism is not a good idea per se just like democracy is not a bad idea even though trying to implement it in Iraq has been a mess. And as far as efficiency of systems go central planning wins hands down any day compared to the amount of waste in a free market. A free market may produce more but that is at the cost of everyone working like crazy and a few of them getting rich while the others piss their lives away. Under communism people had loads of free time to spend with their families as years of effort were not pissed away in startups which failed.
Communism works very well. Ask China or for that matter the fact that the USSR an economy 10 times smaller than USA could compete toe to toe with USA for 50 years proves that communism is much more efficient than capitalism. Communism just doesnt work well when a huge economy like the USA is trying to destroy you and you have to spend all your resources on defense rather than on the benefit of the people. Most rich capitalist countries became rich (under monarchy or as feudal or colonial powers) before they became capitalist . On the other hand there are a number of countires like China, Yugoslavia,Cuba,Russia for that matter who have successfully used communism to pull themselves from developing to developed status. On the other hand most newly freed African, Latin American or Asian countries which tried to use capitalism have ended up as cronist corrupt dictatorships
The fact that the USA let the Russians know they had nuke proof bunkers meant the Russians spent gobs of money making stronger and more powerful nukes to burst those bunkers instead of concentrating merely on say maybe fire engines (which are a lot cheaper to manufacture)
Actually communism is a much more efficient economic system. In capitalism your motivation is to make money so you will do just the bare minimum to be able to sell your product.(ala Microsoft) In communism you know your basic needs will be met and you wont be making more money by sending out a garbage product faster. Once money does not matter anymore all that matters is the satisfaction of having done a good job and created a perfect product as well as the non monetary recognition from your peers of having done a good job. So under communism you would create higher quality products even though you personally dont get any economic benefit from it (ala the open source software movement)
The reason communism failed is communism only works when the entire world is communist. If you have a capitalist system in coexistence you will always have images of a few very wealthy capitalists in other countries which will make your people totally resentfull of communism . Every Tom Dick and Harry will be thinking that if only they had capitalism they could be the rich ones and the rest would be their gardeners when it is more likely they will end up as their gardeners. Marx's initial treatise makes it very clear that communism can only work if all the nations are communist which is why at the beginning the Commintern was so active in fomenting Communist revolutions everywhere.
Even the limited form of communism that the USSR had was much more efficient than capitalism. The proof is that Russia - a frozen wasteland with about the same amount of economic wherewithal as Canada could hold its own against USA for almost 50 years when the USA had 50 times more farmland , 10 times an economy and 3 times a population. If USA and ISSR had been remotely been matched in resources the higher efficiency of communism would have clearly won.
Basically human beings have two motivations fear and pride. Capitalism works on the fear of ending up on the streets and starving if you dont do a good job, communism works on the pride of doing a good job even though you dont need to and the state will make sure you have enough to eat and a place to stay. You can choose which you prefer. The only drawbacks of communism is that it fails to account for another two human drives greed and envy (of people on TV from other countries). A large number of countries have pushed their way from poverty to developed status using communism- Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, Yugoslavia, most of eastern Europe while capitalism has mostly created corrupt dictatorships in latin America and Africa. All the successfull capitalist countries got rich first under monarchy, feudalism or colonialism before they adopted modern capitalism. Capitalism seems to be a bad choice for making the transition from poor to rich.
The thing about having 50 nukes is those 50 can be taken out in a first strike with nukes and then you are naked and open to blackmail. You need to have so many that the enemy cannot count them with any certainty and cant take them all out. Unfortunately this means the enemy will build more to be able to take out all your nukes in a bigger first strike and you have to build more in turn ....
The USA bluffed them into spending their way into bankruptcy and collapse with all these stories of super weapons and facilities that the USA was supposed to be developing and the Russians had to match dollar for ruble. Well it turns out most of these facilities were junk just like Star Wars and the manned space program. The Russians had the more reliable manned program (Soyuz) all along but got demoralized from all the talk about how capitalism can make everything cheaper and better and they just gave up. I guess we should thank Hollywood for our victory in the Cold War more than the Pentagon or the White House.
The typical college entrance exams I took had 4 choices each and 4 points for a correct answer and -1 for a wrong answer. The thing was in a lot of the cases you may not know the correct answer but if you know something about the subject 1 or 2 of the choices are obviously wrong . Now if you eliminate those and guess amongst the rest your chances are much higher than simply not answering a question you don't know the answer to. Mathematically with 2 choices eliminated you have a .5 chance of guessing right so an expected value of 4*.5=2 -1*.5=.5 = 1.5 as opposed to 0 for not attempting. I think this kind of guessing is fair as you are getting rewarded for your partial knowledge which lets you eliminate at least the nonsense solution.
Anyone with a BS even in Biology or Geology or anything not even remotely connected to computers has spent 4 years at college, done numerous assignments for which they have had to look up information from sources like libraries, textbooks,notes and nowadays websites. Such a person is more than capable of doing some online research to figure out which is better from the various benchmarks available online. If you are not and really do have a BS I have to conclude you spent your entire 4 years only at keg parties and never submitted an honest assignment. Either you were on a football scholarship (do you get football scholarships for CS?) or your daddy made a large contribution to the college to get you your BS.
If this guy has a BS in Computers and needs Vista performance index to decide what computer to buy I seriously doubt the quality of a US education. No wonder we need H1Bs to come and run our companies. But seriously I think hes bluffing - noone with a real CS degree is that stupid. Its this kind of talk which gives US Engineers a bad rep.
Dude most of the things he talked about are taught in any decent Web Search or Machine Learning course. He is not disclosing any secrets and Page Rank is actually a 5 day homework assignment not a life's work. Google has gone far beyond Page Rank and Page Rank is just the dummy Google likes to wave about so that people are busy trying to beat Page Rank and not their real classifiers. And classifiers are dime a dozen. Tying them up with efficient network and database resources is Google's key contribution. Rest assured the reason Google is doing well is kept pretty secret. (Hint: Its the database and network algos which allow the maintenance of huge databases and indexes in a distributed manner). BTW If you dont believe Page Rank is a HW assignment look at Dr mooney's course page here http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~mooney/ir-course/
With the coming of the Internet there is too much information available and people are drowning in Information. This changes the value that newspapers can provide. Now the value of newspapers is not that they can bring news to us rather they can filter out useless news i.e. the editorial function becomes the value proposition rather than the journalistic function. When I do a Google news search I already know what I am looking for so basically I already know the news I just want details. This is not as interesting as reading a newspaper where I may come across many unrelated news items I had never even heard off. This expands my horizons. Now the newspaper doesnt need to be on paper it can be online but it needs to be an aggregate of different news articles and opinion pieces (pretty much what Slashdot is and also the reason its so popular). So if Newspapers want to survive in the future they have to become like Slashdot and superspecialize - we already have news for nerds but somebody could turn a current newspaper into news for artists or news for bankers (maybe WSJ already does that) or even a news for general man. We could even have aggregators with liberal or conservative biases and it would be very much like the early days of newspapers where a newspaper had a point of view(just like blogs). Whatever happens the traditional newspaper where you just collect information from different wire services and print it together is going to be dead soon.
Most education in India is carried out in English so regardless of first language anyone at IIT will probably be a better English speaker than the general Slashdot Reader. However that doesnt prevent people from making silly mistakes while typing fast on Slashdot. I mean the Slashdot entry is probably the least important portion of that persons day so lay off on the Grammar Nazism.
I dont believe those numbers. Are you saying IITK has a better faculty student ratio than MIT. Thats very hard to believe given that IITK is not even the top engineering college in India (that title oscillates between IIT Bombay and IIT Delhi) and definitely not the the top research instititute - that honor belongs to Indian Institute of Science Bangalore. Not many in the west hear about IISc as it does not have any undergraduate programs only postgradute research so there is no large population like the IIT B.Engg population working in US industry but if you want to do hard core research in India either you go work for the Army (DRDO), space (ISRO), Atomic establishment(DAE) or you go to IISc. There may be a few others like Indian Statistical Institute(ISI) which built the first Indian computer back in the 50s but the IITs are definitely not premier research institutes. The job of the IITs is to churn out large numbers of well trained Engineers not to carry out Fundamental research.
There is nothing in the constititution about immigration laws. Immigration laws were an unconstitutional addition in 1882 the Chinese exclusion Act - a blatantly racist act. Before that there were no laws preventing anyone in the world from coming to America and as long as they followed American laws they were Americans. Since its not even constitutional to have immigration laws on a national basis how can you have it between states?
However free the market be people are not equal (unless you believe in Communism or Christianity). Every person has a different level of ability and is able to do a different jobs. Jobs which can be done by a large number of people will always pay less than jobs that can be done by only a smaller number of people. The AMA might be artificially restricting the market by say preventing H1Bs being used to hire doctors whithout forcing them to do another degree in the US but the fact reamins even if every doctor in the world was free to practice in the US doctors would still get paid more than the guy who puts up sheet rock or the guy who administers unix servers. Why? Because the doctor could put up sheet rock or administer servers if he put his mind to it but the sheet rock installer or the network admin could never do the doctors job. Yes there is abuse of power at CxO levels but the solution in a free market is to let these companies go bankrupt and let them be taken over by Indian Outsourcing companies whose CEOs live in India and dont make millions of dollars. The free market can deal with most situations but there is no guarantee it will deal with it in way which preserves your standard of living.
What you dont understand is that in the US and in Europe the main product grown by farmers is not Corn wheat or in fact any plant. The main harvest of farmers is subsidies. As long as they have the land they can harvest subsidies from the rest of the population. This is why the cost of land seems artificially high. It would be high if you were considering the productive capaciity of the land to grow crops but when you look at its capacity to grow susbsidies suddenly the high cost of land becomes understandable. Frankly agriculture being a low skilled job has no place in developed economies. However governments after WW2 and its destruction of international shipping have a fear psychosis about becoming dependent on food imports. Hence they want to sustain a home based farming community. The only way to do this in an industrialized economy is via subsidies as otherwise the land is going to shift over to other more productive use. Now whether this is a cost worth paying or not is a different debate - same as the debate on whether its worth spending millions on weapons. If you want security you pay for it - whether that be food security or miltary security.
Working independently needs a set of managerial skills which its not necessary for everyone to have. If everyone was required to run their own businesses we would still be in the age of artisans and home based factories prior to the industrial revolution. Modern society has done a division of labour between technical and managerial skills and just like managers wouldnt be generating any cash without technical workers to do the actual work , technical workers should not be expected to do the managers job as well as their own. Both types are needed in the modern economy and need to be adequately compensated. Unfortunately for the technical types under the current system managers have more pricing power. There probably is a fair solution to this problem but I dont know what it is.
Wow! What just happened here? A company wanted to return a system which was not yet installed (for whatever be their reasons) and the Fonality guys basically blackmailed the Blade CEO that if he tried to return it they would use the press to make them look bad. Do you really think any company will ever again do business with Fonality? CEOs of customer companies dont like being given 60 sec ultimatums. The Fonality guys might have thought just because its an Indian CEO its Okay to browbeat him but boy was he wrong. Fonality employees better start brushing up their resumes as the company is looking at bankruptcy. Sure they may have a great product but guess what - its open source so the only differentiating factor they have is the quality of support and service but if they are going to be dickheads when dealing with customers they are done for. Havnt they heard the expression - " The customer is always right!" ?