Pilots have already expressed alarm over a system that does not provide a manual override. And of course a system like this doesn't help against terrorism if it has a manual override.
Then there is the issue of malfunction without override....
Nothing can go wrong. Nothing can go wrong. Nothing can go wrong. Nothing can go wrong. Nothing can go wrong....
India is self sufficient as regards food grains and does export a lot of food products.
The original post claimed India is #1 in grain production. According to your link, this is not true. As far as agricultural exports, 5.9 billion is relatively small. Canada, a country with 1/30th the population of India exports twice as much. Australia, an even smaller country exports even more.
The Expansionism link
Well, I admit the US has imperialistic ambitions - at least from an economic view. I am sure that India has similar ideas. What exactly else could one call this Sri Lanka business anyway?
US did refuse to give India Cray super computers
Not in the 90's per the original post. After much research I found an incident in the mid 80's where India requested a Cray for missile design work that was turned down.
we invented the Param supercomputer to do the same job in much cheaper and more efficient manner
If this Param is so good, why isn't it mentioned on sites like top500.org that list the top500 supercomputers and their manufacturers?
I did find this rather desultory link regarding the Param.
http://www.cdacindia.com/html/press/spot263.asp
If India can't commercialize a computer built from mostly western parts, how is it going to do with a hypersonic transport?
But Indian pharma companies are beginning to compete with American pharma giants
Now that is really poppycock. Copying patents is not 'competing with American pharma giants' nor does it say anything positive about Indian technology when the rallying cry is we can make it cheaper because our people are paid less. When Indian pharma companies introduce their own NEW drugs that have been awarded American patents they will be competing with the giants like Pfizer and Merkh. Otherwise they are competing with low-end American generics manufacturers like Barr Labs and other followers.
FREE public healthcare available to the common man
Free healthcare can be a wide variety of things. The question is what is the quality of the free health care? If tuberculosis is still a big problem in India, I have to question whether this health care is anything resembling what a western nation would consider adaquate basic health care as the original poster claimed.
A core fallacy americans seem to commit is thinking that american dollars are a valid way of pricing foreign effort.
You are ignoring the fact that research is only a very minor part of building this device. You need a very large industrial base to do so, and I would bet that the cost of building that would be greater in India because you don't have the associated economy to support it.
Well India has more people with Doctorate degrees per capital than any other country in the world.
I don't think that's a very good metric. Heck, looking in my mailbox here I have 6 offers to get a Doctoral degree for $100 in a week or so.
Much more interesting would be a description of India's track record at building supersonic aircraft, and how many billions of dollars are being invested in this research program.
One thing to note in these articles is that a lot of that 'growth' is due to a very favorable monsoon pattern this year - something like 25% of India's GDP is still agricultural - and is likely to be a one-time event. The underlying growth rate is in the 5-6% range.
In the US there are 7 million millionaires (including me) in a 250 million population.
http://www.mistershortcut.org/millionaires2000.h tm l
It is not close, in fact it is more than 100 times off.
The 100 million best off people in India have wealth comparable to the 100 million best off Americans
You are joking, right? The average per capita GDP in India is about $2,600. In the US it is $37,600.
If you take 100 million AVERAGE US residents, their GDP is greater than ALL 1 Billion Indian residents. Which of course includes the 100 million top Indians.
India an ancient and wise one.
It may be ancient, but any society that has a caste system and practices female infanticide at the rate India does cannot considered wise.
Tuberculosis, AIDS and malaria are the main diseases that India has to grapple with across the length and breadth of the country. For many years the government has been focusing on family planning programs to control population growth. Primary health care schemes have been on the agenda also but the services and facilities are stretched. There is a big gap between facilities available in urban and rural areas. Some of the urban private institutions have the most modern equipments and expert doctors, while the government run hospital are scraping for funds and facilities. Patients are overflowing into the urban hospitals at an alarming rate and the health infrastructure is unable to cope with it.
http://www.oneworld.net/article/archive/4509/
India can not only feed its entire population, but it exports too.
India is the second most populous country in the world and third largest economy in Asia. Since its independence 50 years ago, India has followed a policy of self-sufficiency in food production and has never been a major player in the world grain market. This is likely to change in the future due to economic growth, population growth, and resource constraints.
The adoption of market-oriented domestic and trade policies in 1997/98 has led India to an accelerated economic growth. If this growth becomes broad based, it is likely that there will be a significant change in dietary preference. In addition, projected higher population growth will make India the most populous country by the middle of the next century, increasing the pressure on food demand. More importantly, according to United Nations projections, more than 55 percent of the total population will live in urban locations in 2030, compared to 26 percent in 1996.
In contrast, India's agricultural production has slowed significantly in recent years. Historically, growth in agricultural production since the 1960s has been from a sustained rising trend in yields, with no, or slight, increase in area production. Three inputs--irrigation, fertilizer, and high yielding varieties--have accounted for much of the yield growth in the past decades. It has been argued that a declining rate of irrigated area and per hectare fertilizer application has been responsible for the slowing of yield growth. It is alarming to note that production growth is declining at a rate higher than the inputs in recent years.
In the face of the declining growth of agricultural productivity and likely increase in food demand, it is probable that in the future India will come to depend on imported food to meet domestic requirements. To quantify these effects, FAPRI evaluated India's grain demand and supply situation for 2015. Food demand is estimated by taking into account structural change in consumption due to urbanization and income growth. Strong income growth and urbanization are expected to significantly change the composition of the food basket. The average per capita consumption of cereals is projected to rise from 160 kg in 1993 to 168 kg by 2007, and then start declining after 2007, falling to 165 kg by 2015. Rural per capita cereal consumption increases throughout the period, whereas urban per capita cereal consumption until 1999, and then starts to decline.
http://www.fapri.iastate.edu/bulletin/oct98/indi a. htm
India has NEVER had an expansionist ideology.
GROWING MENACE OF INDIAN EXPANSIONISM
Indian state of late has been stepping up its Indian expansionist design over its neighbouring smaller countries. In the context of Nepal, not satisfied with physically nibbling away Nepalese border land bit by bit, stationing of it's military camp over Kalapani land and building illegal barrage in Laxmanpur, inundating thousands of Nepalese villages. it is trying to create psychological pressure of is domination by hook or crook! Take the instance of an Indian Airline plane that was
How ironic it is then that your response is being carried on the Internet, an extension of a network which began as a government program.
The original DARPA program was a defense project, not some dubious economic subsidy. National defense is a very legitimate role of government.
the large government programs that pulled them out of poverty
Your history is very faulty. What pulled people out of poverty was the deficit spending associated with WWII. New Deal job programs had a zero to negative impact on economic activity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal
"As the Depression wore on, Roosevelt tried public works, farm subsidies and other devices to restart the economy, but he never completely gave up trying to balance the budget. As a result, unemployment remained high throughout the New Deal years; consumption, investment, and net exports--the pillars of economic growth--remained low."
Now that the US economy is circling the drain again
Wrong. The US economy is growing very strongly at the moment.
While obviously not everything governments do is worthwhile
I would rephrase that - most things that governments do are not worthwhile. Governments have a great tendency to grow well past the 'optimum' and intrude into areas they have no business in. One of the worst is to use the tax code as a social and/or economic engineering tool.
do note that modern economic theory considers government necessary for certain things that the free market is not adequate for.
I accept that - environmental laws, food package labeling, SEC regulations, banking regulations and so on are things that I think government should play a part in.
But tax subsidies for OS development? Nah. Nope. Not even close.
Your post speaks to a typical Slashdot mindset that precludes getting involved in government to affect a beneficial change for citizens.
If that is the typical slashdot attitude, then good. The most beneficial thing that government can do for its citizens is to leave them alone to live their lives the way they want to as much as possible. This includes not forcing people to subsidize things through hidden taxes that have nothing to do with the business of government. Why the hell should we have have a tax subsidy for open source development? What possible reason does government have for this sort of action? If OS is good, it will survive in the open market. If not, well then it deserves to fail.
We have had endless attempts by government to influence economic decisions through the tax code - examples include programs like the subsidies for alternative energy, you name it. What has been the overall result of these programs? Constant meddling by bureaucrats and people pushing not-readt technologies.
The fact is (and I speak from long industrial experience) that private companies will pay zero attention to this - government is notoriously fickle when it comes to these programs - and the paperwork necessary to take advantage of them seldom pays for itself. This program will cost taxpayers far more than they get in return, it will inject government into an area it has no business in, and will inevitably distort the OS from a remarkably "free" completely international process into something that governments have a distorting influence on.
So this would have the effect of making legitimate high-volume, high-subscribership mailing lists expensive to operate
Well, maybe. There still could be a white list for cases like this.
I think that high volume mailing lists should probably actually be newsgroups anyway. But what it does do is put a crimp in people who host a lot of low volume mailing lists.
Perhaps the people using MySQL don't use those features you mention.
You can do a lot of stuff in MySQL by working around missing features. But WHY???? There are free alternatives out there that don't have key missing features, and don't force you to write these work arounds.
Wouldn't it be much better to just disable the ports where virus floods are coming from...
I am sure it would be. Now suppose you are a cable company with a million subscribers. I'd bet that implementing this would cost you several hundred thousand dollars.
Extremely well made, 5-year warranty. They make backpacks tailored for carrying laptops, have products specifically designed for Apple computers and a wide variety of other products.
One of their items is an insert called a "computer safe insert" that is highly effective module to provide cushioning against impact.
I use their cases to carry computers and cameras all over the world.
What are the chances that we'll still be using the Gregorian calendar in Y10K?
Don't know about the Gregorian calendar, but there are other calendars like the Chinese and Hebrew calendars that are already in year 4000+. These probably will be around for Y10K relative to their starting dates.
Fundamental research is starting to be outsourced as well.
Well, not really. What is described in these articles is applied research. Fundamental research is still primarily the domain of the large research university. When you start seeing people working in India winning Nobel Prizes at rates competitive with people working in North America, that will be a sign that fundamental research is being done in India.
As this situation improves, it greatly decrease the barrier to entering the IT workforce in India and will continue to bring in an army of new workers for years to come
What we have now is an temporary imbalance because India's own economy cannot consume the talents of its own educated people to serve India. The fact that these people now stay in India to work rather than migrate to the US is a great thing for India. After a decade or so 10%/year economic growth India will start competing for the services of its own people. When that happens the cost advantage will disappear. We are already seeing Indian companies outsource or subcontract service sector jobs to lower cost countries.
This is exactly the same scenario that has happened with low value manfacturing. For a couple of decades offshore manufacturing of goods like athletic shoes has chased the lowest wage. As local economies grew when the manufacturing jobs were added to local economies the wage rates went up - along with education - higher value jobs moved in. Now there are no real low wage places left for manufacturing to move to, and it has become more cost effective to invest in automation and similar improvements. The result is that worldwide the number of manufacturing jobs is decreasing. The past few years China has been losing more manufacturing jobs at a higher rate than any other country because wages have gone up, and China has not modernized relative to the rest of the world making their unit costs uncompetitive.
While these dislocations are very painful on a temporary basis, it is important to recognize that this is a temporary situation. Things equalize, and the jobs often do came back once the economics equilibrate. Most Japanese cars sold in the US are manufactured in the US, and in fact some are exported to Japan.
Fundamentally as worker productivity increases businesses will find it more and more attractive to hire people because their contribution to a company's profits is greater. Everywhere, on a global basis.
the heavy-handed smearing of christian admonishments throughout the series largely puts me off
Don't worry, rumor has it all that stuff is being removed. It also looks like HarperCollins is spinning this as a way of exploiting the Harry Potter popularity and is planning 'revised' Cristianity-free versions of the books as well. The are also rumored to be working on followup books written in the 'Narnia' universe.
Of course this has the author spinning in his grave, and lots of protest from people who knew CS Lewis.
One person remarked that they are turning Narnia into the British 'Mickey Mouse'.
Wireless technologies provide endless ways to invade privacy - RFID, Credit Cards, Cell Phones, EZPass, PDA, GPS, subcutaneous transponders implanted when you walk through a mall entrance, Microsoft License activation, whatever.
Clearly the most important technology of the future will be the development of personal jammers to silence the RF nattering of the post-PC era world of gizmos carried about one's person, implanted under skin (overtly or surreptitiously) or attached into clothing. Everyone will be looking for RF cones of silence, ways to use a taser like device to EMP a wireless spybot picked up by walking into a movie theatre (or implanted by the Selective Service) or shielded pouches to prevent RF attacks on credit cards or other payment/identification devices.
If I was looking to report on bleeding edge tech, this is where I would look.
You think spyware like Gator is bad? You haven't seen nothing yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Pilots have already expressed alarm over a system that does not provide a manual override. And of course a system like this doesn't help against terrorism if it has a manual override.
...
Then there is the issue of malfunction without override....
Nothing can go wrong.
Nothing can go wrong.
Nothing can go wrong.
Nothing can go wrong.
Nothing can go wrong.
India is self sufficient as regards food grains and does export a lot of food products.
The original post claimed India is #1 in grain production. According to your link, this is not true. As far as agricultural exports, 5.9 billion is relatively small. Canada, a country with 1/30th the population of India exports twice as much. Australia, an even smaller country exports even more.
The Expansionism link
Well, I admit the US has imperialistic ambitions - at least from an economic view. I am sure that India has similar ideas. What exactly else could one call this Sri Lanka business anyway?
US did refuse to give India Cray super computers
Not in the 90's per the original post. After much research I found an incident in the mid 80's where India requested a Cray for missile design work that was turned down.
we invented the Param supercomputer to do the same job in much cheaper and more efficient manner
If this Param is so good, why isn't it mentioned on sites like top500.org that list the top500 supercomputers and their manufacturers?
I did find this rather desultory link regarding the Param.
http://www.cdacindia.com/html/press/spot263.asp
If India can't commercialize a computer built from mostly western parts, how is it going to do with a hypersonic transport?
But Indian pharma companies are beginning to compete with American pharma giants
Now that is really poppycock. Copying patents is not 'competing with American pharma giants' nor does it say anything positive about Indian technology when the rallying cry is we can make it cheaper because our people are paid less. When Indian pharma companies introduce their own NEW drugs that have been awarded American patents they will be competing with the giants like Pfizer and Merkh. Otherwise they are competing with low-end American generics manufacturers like Barr Labs and other followers.
FREE public healthcare available to the common man
Free healthcare can be a wide variety of things. The question is what is the quality of the free health care? If tuberculosis is still a big problem in India, I have to question whether this health care is anything resembling what a western nation would consider adaquate basic health care as the original poster claimed.
I heard the same kind of down talking about the Japanese in the 60's and 70's
It was right, too. Japan was supposed to supplant the US as the #1 world power. Guess what. It didn't happen.
A core fallacy americans seem to commit is thinking that american dollars are a valid way of pricing foreign effort.
You are ignoring the fact that research is only a very minor part of building this device. You need a very large industrial base to do so, and I would bet that the cost of building that would be greater in India because you don't have the associated economy to support it.
Well India has more people with Doctorate degrees per capital than any other country in the world.
I don't think that's a very good metric. Heck, looking in my mailbox here I have 6 offers to get a Doctoral degree for $100 in a week or so.
Much more interesting would be a description of India's track record at building supersonic aircraft, and how many billions of dollars are being invested in this research program.
One thing to note in these articles is that a lot of that 'growth' is due to a very favorable monsoon pattern this year - something like 25% of India's GDP is still agricultural - and is likely to be a one-time event. The underlying growth rate is in the 5-6% range.
there are still many families in India worth 10s and even 100s of millions of dollars.
e .a spx?SectionId=173
h tm l
40-50,000 families out of a 1 Billion+ population in India are millionaires.
http://www.businessworldindia.com/WebUserArticl
In the US there are 7 million millionaires (including me) in a 250 million population.
http://www.mistershortcut.org/millionaires2000.
It is not close, in fact it is more than 100 times off.
The 100 million best off people in India have wealth comparable to the 100 million best off Americans
You are joking, right? The average per capita GDP in India is about $2,600. In the US it is $37,600.
If you take 100 million AVERAGE US residents, their GDP is greater than ALL 1 Billion Indian residents. Which of course includes the 100 million top Indians.
India an ancient and wise one.
It may be ancient, but any society that has a caste system and practices female infanticide at the rate India does cannot considered wise.
Here is a rebuttal to your diatribe:
Govt. run hospital.
Tuberculosis, AIDS and malaria are the main diseases that India has to grapple with across the length and breadth of the country. For many years the government has been focusing on family planning programs to control population growth. Primary health care schemes have been on the agenda also but the services and facilities are stretched. There is a big gap between facilities available in urban and rural areas. Some of the urban private institutions have the most modern equipments and expert doctors, while the government run hospital are scraping for funds and facilities. Patients are overflowing into the urban hospitals at an alarming rate and the health infrastructure is unable to cope with it.
http://www.oneworld.net/article/archive/4509/
India can not only feed its entire population, but it exports too.
India is the second most populous country in the world and third largest economy in Asia. Since its independence 50 years ago, India has followed a policy of self-sufficiency in food production and has never been a major player in the world grain market. This is likely to change in the future due to economic growth, population growth, and resource constraints.
The adoption of market-oriented domestic and trade policies in 1997/98 has led India to an accelerated economic growth. If this growth becomes broad based, it is likely that there will be a significant change in dietary preference. In addition, projected higher population growth will make India the most populous country by the middle of the next century, increasing the pressure on food demand. More importantly, according to United Nations projections, more than 55 percent of the total population will live in urban locations in 2030, compared to 26 percent in 1996.
In contrast, India's agricultural production has slowed significantly in recent years. Historically, growth in agricultural production since the 1960s has been from a sustained rising trend in yields, with no, or slight, increase in area production. Three inputs--irrigation, fertilizer, and high yielding varieties--have accounted for much of the yield growth in the past decades. It has been argued that a declining rate of irrigated area and per hectare fertilizer application has been responsible for the slowing of yield growth. It is alarming to note that production growth is declining at a rate higher than the inputs in recent years.
In the face of the declining growth of agricultural productivity and likely increase in food demand, it is probable that in the future India will come to depend on imported food to meet domestic requirements. To quantify these effects, FAPRI evaluated India's grain demand and supply situation for 2015. Food demand is estimated by taking into account structural change in consumption due to urbanization and income growth. Strong income growth and urbanization are expected to significantly change the composition of the food basket. The average per capita consumption of cereals is projected to rise from 160 kg in 1993 to 168 kg by 2007, and then start declining after 2007, falling to 165 kg by 2015. Rural per capita cereal consumption increases throughout the period, whereas urban per capita cereal consumption until 1999, and then starts to decline.
http://www.fapri.iastate.edu/bulletin/oct98/indi a. htm
India has NEVER had an expansionist ideology.
GROWING MENACE OF INDIAN EXPANSIONISM
Indian state of late has been stepping up its Indian expansionist design over its neighbouring smaller countries. In the context of Nepal, not satisfied with physically nibbling away Nepalese border land bit by bit, stationing of it's military camp over Kalapani land and building illegal barrage in Laxmanpur, inundating thousands of Nepalese villages. it is trying to create psychological pressure of is domination by hook or crook! Take the instance of an Indian Airline plane that was
How ironic it is then that your response is being carried on the Internet, an extension of a network which began as a government program.
The original DARPA program was a defense project, not some dubious economic subsidy. National defense is a very legitimate role of government.
the large government programs that pulled them out of poverty
Your history is very faulty. What pulled people out of poverty was the deficit spending associated with WWII. New Deal job programs had a zero to negative impact on economic activity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal
"As the Depression wore on, Roosevelt tried public works, farm subsidies and other devices to restart the economy, but he never completely gave up trying to balance the budget. As a result, unemployment remained high throughout the New Deal years; consumption, investment, and net exports--the pillars of economic growth--remained low."
Now that the US economy is circling the drain again
Wrong. The US economy is growing very strongly at the moment.
While obviously not everything governments do is worthwhile
I would rephrase that - most things that governments do are not worthwhile. Governments have a great tendency to grow well past the 'optimum' and intrude into areas they have no business in. One of the worst is to use the tax code as a social and/or economic engineering tool.
Parkinson was right.
do note that modern economic theory considers government necessary for certain things that the free market is not adequate for.
I accept that - environmental laws, food package labeling, SEC regulations, banking regulations and so on are things that I think government should play a part in.
But tax subsidies for OS development? Nah. Nope. Not even close.
Keep in mind that open source software can be audited and modified by anybody
We could certainly see a list of 'approved' projects for government support...
Yes - Encryption the NSA can read
No - Encryption that keeps stuff secret
Yes - Software in english
No - Software in nasty foreign languages
-etc.
Your post speaks to a typical Slashdot mindset that precludes getting involved in government to affect a beneficial change for citizens.
If that is the typical slashdot attitude, then good. The most beneficial thing that government can do for its citizens is to leave them alone to live their lives the way they want to as much as possible. This includes not forcing people to subsidize things through hidden taxes that have nothing to do with the business of government. Why the hell should we have have a tax subsidy for open source development? What possible reason does government have for this sort of action? If OS is good, it will survive in the open market. If not, well then it deserves to fail.
We have had endless attempts by government to influence economic decisions through the tax code - examples include programs like the subsidies for alternative energy, you name it. What has been the overall result of these programs? Constant meddling by bureaucrats and people pushing not-readt technologies.
The fact is (and I speak from long industrial experience) that private companies will pay zero attention to this - government is notoriously fickle when it comes to these programs - and the paperwork necessary to take advantage of them seldom pays for itself. This program will cost taxpayers far more than they get in return, it will inject government into an area it has no business in, and will inevitably distort the OS from a remarkably "free" completely international process into something that governments have a distorting influence on.
wouldn't it be great for the OS community if we could provide a law to facilitate tax cuts to companies who give to OS
Absolutely not. As soon as you get government involved, OS becomes political, and influenced by political forces. This is the last thing we want.
So this would have the effect of making legitimate high-volume, high-subscribership mailing lists expensive to operate
Well, maybe. There still could be a white list for cases like this.
I think that high volume mailing lists should probably actually be newsgroups anyway. But what it does do is put a crimp in people who host a lot of low volume mailing lists.
Perhaps the people using MySQL don't use those features you mention.
You can do a lot of stuff in MySQL by working around missing features. But WHY???? There are free alternatives out there that don't have key missing features, and don't force you to write these work arounds.
How about foreign keys? I looked in the manual and STILL didn't see that.
Hey -
They said the storage space was disaster proof - that doesn't imply that you can get the stuff back out.
Wouldn't it be much better to just disable the ports where virus floods are coming from...
I am sure it would be. Now suppose you are a cable company with a million subscribers. I'd bet that implementing this would cost you several hundred thousand dollars.
Your ISP shouldnt have to filter out random ports because someone somewhere wrote some crap software which is now easily explotaible over those ports.
Well, yes but what happens when the ISP's network is flooded with worm traffic? They really don't have much choice.
www.tenba.com
Extremely well made, 5-year warranty. They make backpacks tailored for carrying laptops, have products specifically designed for Apple computers and a wide variety of other products.
One of their items is an insert called a "computer safe insert" that is highly effective module to provide cushioning against impact.
I use their cases to carry computers and cameras all over the world.
Best I have ever seen.
What are the chances that we'll still be using the Gregorian calendar in Y10K?
Don't know about the Gregorian calendar, but there are other calendars like the Chinese and Hebrew calendars that are already in year 4000+. These probably will be around for Y10K relative to their starting dates.
Fundamental research is starting to be outsourced as well.
/ 10 /13/daily30.html
Well, not really. What is described in these articles is applied research. Fundamental research is still primarily the domain of the large research university. When you start seeing people working in India winning Nobel Prizes at rates competitive with people working in North America, that will be a sign that fundamental research is being done in India.
As this situation improves, it greatly decrease the barrier to entering the IT workforce in India and will continue to bring in an army of new workers for years to come
What we have now is an temporary imbalance because India's own economy cannot consume the talents of its own educated people to serve India. The fact that these people now stay in India to work rather than migrate to the US is a great thing for India. After a decade or so 10%/year economic growth India will start competing for the services of its own people. When that happens the cost advantage will disappear. We are already seeing Indian companies outsource or subcontract service sector jobs to lower cost countries.
This is exactly the same scenario that has happened with low value manfacturing. For a couple of decades offshore manufacturing of goods like athletic shoes has chased the lowest wage. As local economies grew when the manufacturing jobs were added to local economies the wage rates went up - along with education - higher value jobs moved in. Now there are no real low wage places left for manufacturing to move to, and it has become more cost effective to invest in automation and similar improvements. The result is that worldwide the number of manufacturing jobs is decreasing. The past few years China has been losing more manufacturing jobs at a higher rate than any other country because wages have gone up, and China has not modernized relative to the rest of the world making their unit costs uncompetitive.
http://www.bizjournals.com/buffalo/stories/2003
While these dislocations are very painful on a temporary basis, it is important to recognize that this is a temporary situation. Things equalize, and the jobs often do came back once the economics equilibrate. Most Japanese cars sold in the US are manufactured in the US, and in fact some are exported to Japan.
Fundamentally as worker productivity increases businesses will find it more and more attractive to hire people because their contribution to a company's profits is greater. Everywhere, on a global basis.
the heavy-handed smearing of christian admonishments throughout the series largely puts me off
Don't worry, rumor has it all that stuff is being removed. It also looks like HarperCollins is spinning this as a way of exploiting the Harry Potter popularity and is planning 'revised' Cristianity-free versions of the books as well. The are also rumored to be working on followup books written in the 'Narnia' universe.
Of course this has the author spinning in his grave, and lots of protest from people who knew CS Lewis.
One person remarked that they are turning Narnia into the British 'Mickey Mouse'.
Sickening IMHO.
Yes, and what about bugs that attach themselves to the outside of the suit? Maybe even poke antennas in through the foil?
No, I do not think a simple passive tinfoil suit will work.
Wireless technologies provide endless ways to invade privacy - RFID, Credit Cards, Cell Phones, EZPass, PDA, GPS, subcutaneous transponders implanted when you walk through a mall entrance, Microsoft License activation, whatever.
Clearly the most important technology of the future will be the development of personal jammers to silence the RF nattering of the post-PC era world of gizmos carried about one's person, implanted under skin (overtly or surreptitiously) or attached into clothing. Everyone will be looking for RF cones of silence, ways to use a taser like device to EMP a wireless spybot picked up by walking into a movie theatre (or implanted by the Selective Service) or shielded pouches to prevent RF attacks on credit cards or other payment/identification devices.
If I was looking to report on bleeding edge tech, this is where I would look.
You think spyware like Gator is bad? You haven't seen nothing yet.