Actually, the speed is very much an issue. Most traditional CDMA/3G phones cannot service objects moving at high speeds (more than 128 Kmph) because their receivers cannot keep track; read up on finger tracking on rake receivers. A call may last for a few seconds (if that) before getting dropped. I understand a few cell towers designed in the past few years can support high speeds, but they are mostly deployed in Japan and are not in common use. 2G systems will almost surely not be able to support high speeds.
The other issue is handoff, a particular tower serves a relatively small area (maybe a few km in urban areas). Assuming a 10 kilometer cell diameter, a plane traveling at 500 Mph would be switching between cells at a rate of one switch every 45 seconds. [10/ (500*1.6) ) * 3600. ] Now it is theoretically possible for CDMA & 3G systems to support this rate, but it is somewhat hard to imagine such handoffs happening reliably while the plane is moving so fast.
I've worked in the cellular industry and I'm still not sure of how the calls from the 9/11 planes worked. In fact, many of the 9/11 truthers point to this inconsistency as support of their claims that the calls never happened:)
And I'm confused about some of your other comments... AFAIK there are many products (expensive, mind you) that can listen in on cellular frequencies, whether analog or digital. These are used in cell phone/base station design all the time.
Cisco is no longer a `high tech’ company by any stretch of imagination. The bulk of the technical work that is being done there is incremental and low-value-add, and can easily be done by the sort of easily-led newbies that such companies are eager to hire in the third world. They need very few experts. In the meantime, companies running datacenters are beginning to realize that they do not need the full-fledged switches, routers and other gear that comply to ten thousand IEEE standards. Google et-al are sourcing the hardware cheaply from china and having their own folks write just the bare minimum of networking code required to get stuff working in their datacenters. They are un-willing to pay Cisco premiums. Cisco has managed to bribe enough politicians and spread enough FUD to keep Huawei out of the US. But such tactics do not work too well outside the US, those markets figure that if someone is spying on them anyway, it might as well be the cheaper vendor.
Consequently, over the past 5 years, all semblance of commercial value has been driven out of the networking industry in the west. There are hardly any networking/telecommunication companies left. The infrastructure divisions of Lucent, Nortel, Motorola, Nokia & Siemens have either disappeared completely or exist only in vestigial forms. Folks who populated the networking industry in the late nineties and early 2000s have flocked to the surviving companies, wiz, Cisco & Juniper. Most (but definitely not all) of the smart folks sensed the oncoming demise of the networking industry and got out of Dodge while the getting was good. This means that old-school companies like Cisco and Juniper are stuffed full of people who are unemployable anywhere else. Their skills are too specialized and not transferable to any of the emerging software fields, or simply not of value in such companies. (What good does an intimate knowledge of zero-copy technologies to a company that considers hardware a commodity and writes all their stuff in Java, resulting in hundreds of copies under the hood?) They have not really kept in touch with the basics of computer science and are mostly unable to make it through the interview processes of growing web-based companies.
Thus, as other posters have indicated, there is a large volume of deadwood at Cisco. The first concern of most of such folks is to avoid being caught in the next layoff. Everyone realizes that Cisco is slowly and systematically shedding heads in the US, Europe & other high head-count countries and growing in India, a-la IBM. The politics at Cisco will make that in the US congress seem like that of a preschool. It is commonly heard within Cisco that the entire caste system of India has been replicated there. Cisco has not developed anything innovative in-house for more than a decade. Pretty much all their new product introductions have been acquisitions. No wonder John Chambers sees no value in in-house talent.
I do not intend to suggest that everyone in Cisco is sub-par. I personally know some excellent A+ engineers who are still hanging on there for various (valid and questionable) reasons, and I wish them all the best, and hope they manage to find other employment before the axe reaches their own necks.
Remember this the next time some artistic type is trying to argue that their work is somehow `creative', as opposed to the mindless, artisan endeavors of engineers, computer scientists, burger flippers etc...
They respect him, of course. They may even admire him or even worship him. But how many people who have to interact with him personally actually like him?
Does he behave this way to his family? The arguments he makes offer no distinctions between technical stupidity and any other kind. Does he abuse his wife/children because they don't come up to his standards of smartness? I am guessing not. If so, then he is being a hypocrite by abusing his professional acquaintances, who doubtless feel compelled to put up with his rude behavior because of the aforementioned admiration/respect.
There is a `white' elephant in the room as far as Silicon Valley is concerned. Whites are a minority in most areas. Most of the decent schools are overwhelmingly Asian and the school cultures have transformed to reflect this fact. The over-whelming focus is on academics to the detriment of extra-curricular activities like sports or art. This does not affect a twenty-something who has moved over from some other part of the country; he is too busy enjoying the fantastic weather and rubbing shoulders with the tech elite. It does matter to a 40-something whose two kids are the only whites in their class. Even if he does not care, his partner may not see it the same way.
There are already areas of the bay area that whites people avoid if they can help it... Sunnyvale, Fremont, Milpitas, most of San Jose, Santa Clara, Cupertino.
I'm neither defending nor criticizing these attitudes or considerations. Just pointing out that they exist.
I'm a great fan of KDE 3.x also. For what it is worth, I find that KDE4.9+ to be as stable as 3.x ever was, and as feature-full... as a DESKTOP.
I also switched away from KDE 4 to gnome in the early days of KDE4, and was rather reluctantly forced away from Gnome by the recent modifications. I tried KDE4.9 that was packaged as part of Fedora 18, and was very pleasantly surprised. KDE has recovered. It is VERY configurable, supports the usual windows paradigms that we're used to and is very very stable.
HOWEVER, the KDE apps are a different story. They are still half-complete, buggy and lose data. Even basic apps that I use regularly are fairly primitive. For example, KDE has a number of image viewers (Gwenview, Kuickshow...) but none of them can hold a candle to the power, elegance and simplicity of an 8-year old GQview or its modern cousin Geeqie. I tried the mail app on an experimental basis and was rewarded by prompt crashes and data corruptions. There is nothing even close to Gimp, Pan or other staples of Gnome.
So I find myself in the weird position of running the KDE desktop, but using mostly gnome apps.
I heard that there is a bug in the 3g subsystem that prevents the phone from connecting to the towers, so it keeps retrying and wasting the battery. So it only affects 3G operators like AT&T, won't affect folks on Verizon.
You are absolutely right. Old people are in general desperately lonely, and they often suppress `warning messages' for the company when being conned by a smart personable young person (or a cheerful voice at the end of the phone line).
The problem is really social isolation.
The father of one of my closest friends (in his 80s) was conned into investing close to $250,000.00 into a real estate venture in Latin America. He is not someone who comes across as a doddering old man. He is still alert, reasonably physically fit (for his age) and shows no signs of dementia. He had a successful career in business and survived all the vicious corporate politics of the huge corporation that he worked for, and retired with a healthy retirement account.
But pretty much everyone he knows is either dead or lives too far away for regular contact. His children live across the country and his spouse is no more. He has almost no living friends. Pretty much everyone whom he knew before he was 30 have passed on. The elderly do not make new friends very easily with their own age group. He goes for weeks without talking to a single soul (think of the guy from the movie `Up', that scenario is quite accurate). He is isolated, lonely, disenfranchised and desperate to feel relevant to society.
He was ripe for the picking by the smart young woman who knocked on his door in a business suit, heels and with a briefcase full of glossy brochures.
This is just part of life and how nature has programmed us. For better or for worse, women are the once who define the social rules of life. And this has always been the case. The root cause of this is that women are far more valuable to `the tribe' than men are, and society is reflexively programmed to protect the feminine interest. Trying to criticize this dynamic through a logical perspective is quite counter-productive. It is almost impossible for a man to criticize a woman, or indeed any aspect of female culture without looking like a whiny crybaby or a clueless idiot. A better thing would be to accept this and either move on or find ways to use this to your advantage.
A few other asymmetries to add to the list: 1. Porn for men is heavily regulated and looked down upon. It is almost impossible for a man to be known as a consumer of porn and still maintain a decent social standing. However, you can buy women's pornography at Walmart, and female judges openly discuss reading `50 shades of grey'.
2. A woman who uses her sexuality/command of the language etc to intimidate, manipulate or verbally castrate men is generally admired in the US culture. A man who shouts at a woman attains immediate jerkhood.
3. Most woman in a committed relationship use sex (or the withholding thereof) as a powerful tool to control the men in their life. How many times have you heard the phrase `he is going to sleep on the couch tonight?' This is generally considered an admirable thing in our culture.
4. Research indicates that women `stray' as much as men outside relationships. About 20% of men who think the are the fathers of their own kids are mistaken. However, it is men that are penalized by society and the legal system for failing to keep it in their pants.
The list goes on. Noone will be able to change any of this, unless you move to Islamic-style societies.
Citation please? According to Wikipedia, the only terrorist group to employ this tactic is Hamas, even though Israeli security does screen women -- which rather invalidates the theory.
Not correct. The Tamil Tigers and various other groups have used women suicide bombers. Rajiv Gandhi, the ex-Prime Minister of India was killed by female suicide bomber.
The Indian Christian Church (at least some of them) have a history of doing stuff like this; the aggressive conversion tactics they have adopted will put most US fundamentalist churches to shame. During a trip out there a few years ago, I witnessed a priest perform a "your Hindu god is false" demonstration in public field, accompanied by (I kid you not) an orchestra, with the entire performance amplified by huge speakers placed all around. The priest was dressed in robes reminiscent of a medieval Pope, and threw a Hindu Idol and a Cross into a big glass tank of water. The Hindu Idol sank, and the cross floated, and the guy exclaimed that this showed that the Hindu god was a false god. It was obvious that the idol was made of stone and the cross of wood. There was a huge crowd standing by, many of them ooh'd and aah'd. It looked like at least some of the ooh'ers were part of the performance. I went up to the priest and challenged him, and he started yelling at me. Some of his acolytes grabbed me and basically pushed me away from the place. I think I would surely have been beaten up if I had not been a foreigner.
I learned later that this sort of stuff is quite common in India. The church has started Christian ceremonies during mainstream Indian festivals like Diwali etc, during which time theys hold huge, extravagant masses to celebrate supposedly Christian events. If you are a student of history and want to know how "Christmas" ultimately ended up in December, this would be an object lesson.
The thing that amazed me was how tolerant the crowds were. Here was a guy who was yelling insults about the mainstream religion in a public place, and a vast crown just watched and let him have his say in peace. I doubt if this would happen in the US, let alone in any predominantly Islamic place.
Banning porn/hookers is basically pandering to women. Much of Woman's social influence and power derives from the sexual hold She has on Man. Pornography and hookers directly threaten that hold.
This is not very different from the govt trying to get the ACTA through to satisfy the movie industry.
As someone with a fair amount of experience in high tech and software development, I'd argue that everything you wrote about Indian programmers could equally apply to American ones. Still, for the sake of argument, let us assume that you are right. There is still one overwhelming reasons why managers (i.e. PHBs) prefer Indian programmers (either in the USA or India). That is: ego (or the lack of it).
Let us face it: Indians in general are happy to do what they are told. They do not grumble that the work is not challenging enough, or too demeaning. They tend to stick with the company even they are not doing the most sexy, glamorous work. They don't mind following software development processes laid down by management (and in fact, from what I've seen, many of them actually find that preferable to `genius' type mind-to-keyboard) programming. They do not mind working on bugfixes. They do not mind working under the direction of other, senior people, especially if the senior people are Americans.
Compare that to the average American engineer you find, especially in Silicon Valley. Let us postulate for the sake of argument that they are all programming gods. But I'd also argue that you won't find a more ego-centric, arrogant, inconsiderate bunch of prima donnas outside an Italian opera house. They are great at early stage startups as they sling together large amounts of code quickly. But they are absolutely terrible at dealing with the `grindwork' required to transform the technology into a product. They complain. They whine. They blackmail the management ("Institute that process and I'm gone!!"). They quit at inconvenient times anyway.
I'd argue that unless you are doing something at the super-high end, you probably don't need everyone at that talent level. For the average tech company, a mix of 20% Americans and 80% Indians would probably be more than adequate. The PHBs know this. That is why outsourcing will continue unless the govt puts a stop to it by some means.
Absolutely. If this is true, this may well be a deliberate act of provocation, intended to get Iran's military to do something stupid or over-reach, which would give the US the excuse it needs to start the war which the war machine desperately wants.
This sort of thing happens all the time; Country A wants to invade Country B, but needs a `good/just/patriotic' reason to sell home and abroad. Enter the agent provocateur.
America is the largest arms exporter in the world; the only reason the dictators don't provide American arms to their rank and file is because they are in general too expensive and perceived to be unreliable compared to AKs. But there are plenty of American-made heavy weapons found all over third-world killing zones.
Usually, when some right-wing guy brings up the `get a pair' taunt during some argument about some symbol/statement/law that offends somebody, I usually use the following to make them get the point.
1) Mosque at ground zero. If the Muslims have money to set up a mosque there, why is it your concern? You should just swallow your feelings, right? 2) Mapplethorpe Exhibit. Jesus in a jar of urine. You should just man up, right? 3) Gay parade in SF. Everybody should just STFU, right?
You get the picture. There are lots of such examples you can bring up.
Does not work on nVidia-based machines
on
GNOME 3.2 Released
·
· Score: 1
Gnome 3.0 does not even start up on most systems with nVidia-based graphics cards. I've been trying to get it started to no avail. Nobody seems to know or care about the problem. I've had to switch to xfce.
Makes no sense to me; KDE4.x works fine, so does Gnome 2.x. X itself has no problem either for 2D, 3D or sound. Hope they have fixed this in 3.2.
This is an unfortunate consequence of Wall Street getting to call too many shots.
Wall Street does not want hands-on, promoted from within CEOs in any company, especially not publicly traded ones. It wants CEOs whose worldview is the same as theirs. The ideal CEO would buy into their worldview, and who would react to impulses that make sense to Wall Street and ignore all other information. Wall Street is particularly biased against folks with engineering training.
In general, stocks of any company where the CEO does not have connections to/is not beholden to Wall Street get punished and under-perform. This puts pressure on the board to hire `media darling' sociopathic CEOs.
In addition, such a CEO would make damned sure that there is no obvious internal candidate replacement as a survival strategy, by emasculating anyone who seems competent, or making sure they have no public profile whatsoever. There are plenty of academic studies that establish this.
There are still a few companies that have a strong tradition of training mgmt or promoting from within. GE is an obvious example.
A good friend of mine recently interviewed at Google for a technical position and was turned down; a first in his career and a nasty shock for the man. This is a guy who has done fundamental work in his field, which is admittedly not web-programming but an underlying discipline that Google is now trying to get into. He said that he was interviewed by a bunch of fairly young programmers, a couple of whom admitted that they had not even read his resume. One of them said `My job is to ask you about search', and hit him with a bunch of questions about graph theory algorithms, even though he admitted that he had not done anything in that field and it was not really required for the specific group he was interviewing for. His opinion of the process was that it is biased VERY heavily towards people who are just out of school, since they are the only folks who will have such knowledge at their fingerprints. If that particular hiring process is representative, Google is hiring themselves a bunch of people that fit a specific paradigm, and blatantly screening out folks that don't fit. Time will tell if this serves them well in the long term.
They are probably cross-referencing the info provided by the user against their databases. I'm sure the personal data available to facebook is comprehensive. For example:
New user lists his/her address, gender. John Smith, Male, 13, lives at 20 Silicon Valley way, CA.
Facebook accesses data bases that tell it that the inhabitants of 20 Silicon Valley way are Peter, Mary, Linda & John, ages 35, 32, 13 & 10, respectively.
Facebook figures out that the new user is actually only 10.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the speed is very much an issue. Most traditional CDMA/3G phones cannot service objects moving at high speeds (more than 128 Kmph) because their receivers cannot keep track; read up on finger tracking on rake receivers. A call may last for a few seconds (if that) before getting dropped. I understand a few cell towers designed in the past few years can support high speeds, but they are mostly deployed in Japan and are not in common use. 2G systems will almost surely not be able to support high speeds.
The other issue is handoff, a particular tower serves a relatively small area (maybe a few km in urban areas). Assuming a 10 kilometer cell diameter, a plane traveling at 500 Mph would be switching between cells at a rate of one switch every 45 seconds. [10/ (500*1.6) ) * 3600. ] Now it is theoretically possible for CDMA & 3G systems to support this rate, but it is somewhat hard to imagine such handoffs happening reliably while the plane is moving so fast.
I've worked in the cellular industry and I'm still not sure of how the calls from the 9/11 planes worked. In fact, many of the 9/11 truthers point to this inconsistency as support of their claims that the calls never happened :)
CDMA is not analog.
And I'm confused about some of your other comments... AFAIK there are many products (expensive, mind you) that can listen in on cellular frequencies, whether analog or digital. These are used in cell phone/base station design all the time.
Cisco is no longer a `high tech’ company by any stretch of imagination. The bulk of the technical work that is being done there is incremental and low-value-add, and can easily be done by the sort of easily-led newbies that such companies are eager to hire in the third world. They need very few experts. In the meantime, companies running datacenters are beginning to realize that they do not need the full-fledged switches, routers and other gear that comply to ten thousand IEEE standards. Google et-al are sourcing the hardware cheaply from china and having their own folks write just the bare minimum of networking code required to get stuff working in their datacenters. They are un-willing to pay Cisco premiums. Cisco has managed to bribe enough politicians and spread enough FUD to keep Huawei out of the US. But such tactics do not work too well outside the US, those markets figure that if someone is spying on them anyway, it might as well be the cheaper vendor.
Consequently, over the past 5 years, all semblance of commercial value has been driven out of the networking industry in the west. There are hardly any networking/telecommunication companies left. The infrastructure divisions of Lucent, Nortel, Motorola, Nokia & Siemens have either disappeared completely or exist only in vestigial forms. Folks who populated the networking industry in the late nineties and early 2000s have flocked to the surviving companies, wiz, Cisco & Juniper. Most (but definitely not all) of the smart folks sensed the oncoming demise of the networking industry and got out of Dodge while the getting was good. This means that old-school companies like Cisco and Juniper are stuffed full of people who are unemployable anywhere else. Their skills are too specialized and not transferable to any of the emerging software fields, or simply not of value in such companies. (What good does an intimate knowledge of zero-copy technologies to a company that considers hardware a commodity and writes all their stuff in Java, resulting in hundreds of copies under the hood?) They have not really kept in touch with the basics of computer science and are mostly unable to make it through the interview processes of growing web-based companies.
Thus, as other posters have indicated, there is a large volume of deadwood at Cisco. The first concern of most of such folks is to avoid being caught in the next layoff. Everyone realizes that Cisco is slowly and systematically shedding heads in the US, Europe & other high head-count countries and growing in India, a-la IBM. The politics at Cisco will make that in the US congress seem like that of a preschool. It is commonly heard within Cisco that the entire caste system of India has been replicated there. Cisco has not developed anything innovative in-house for more than a decade. Pretty much all their new product introductions have been acquisitions. No wonder John Chambers sees no value in in-house talent.
I do not intend to suggest that everyone in Cisco is sub-par. I personally know some excellent A+ engineers who are still hanging on there for various (valid and questionable) reasons, and I wish them all the best, and hope they manage to find other employment before the axe reaches their own necks.
Remember this the next time some artistic type is trying to argue that their work is somehow `creative', as opposed to the mindless, artisan endeavors of engineers, computer scientists, burger flippers etc...
They respect him, of course. They may even admire him or even worship him. But how many people who have to interact with him personally actually like him?
Does he behave this way to his family? The arguments he makes offer no distinctions between technical stupidity and any other kind. Does he abuse his wife/children because they don't come up to his standards of smartness? I am guessing not. If so, then he is being a hypocrite by abusing his professional acquaintances, who doubtless feel compelled to put up with his rude behavior because of the aforementioned admiration/respect.
There is a `white' elephant in the room as far as Silicon Valley is concerned. Whites are a minority in most areas. Most of the decent schools are overwhelmingly Asian and the school cultures have transformed to reflect this fact. The over-whelming focus is on academics to the detriment of extra-curricular activities like sports or art. This does not affect a twenty-something who has moved over from some other part of the country; he is too busy enjoying the fantastic weather and rubbing shoulders with the tech elite. It does matter to a 40-something whose two kids are the only whites in their class. Even if he does not care, his partner may not see it the same way.
There are already areas of the bay area that whites people avoid if they can help it... Sunnyvale, Fremont, Milpitas, most of San Jose, Santa Clara, Cupertino.
I'm neither defending nor criticizing these attitudes or considerations. Just pointing out that they exist.
Hi,
I'm a great fan of KDE 3.x also. For what it is worth, I find that KDE4.9+ to be as stable as 3.x ever was, and as feature-full... as a DESKTOP.
I also switched away from KDE 4 to gnome in the early days of KDE4, and was rather reluctantly forced away from Gnome by the recent modifications. I tried KDE4.9 that was packaged as part of Fedora 18, and was very pleasantly surprised. KDE has recovered. It is VERY configurable, supports the usual windows paradigms that we're used to and is very very stable.
HOWEVER, the KDE apps are a different story. They are still half-complete, buggy and lose data. Even basic apps that I use regularly are fairly primitive. For example, KDE has a number of image viewers (Gwenview, Kuickshow...) but none of them can hold a candle to the power, elegance and simplicity of an 8-year old GQview or its modern cousin Geeqie. I tried the mail app on an experimental basis and was rewarded by prompt crashes and data corruptions. There is nothing even close to Gimp, Pan or other staples of Gnome.
So I find myself in the weird position of running the KDE desktop, but using mostly gnome apps.
I heard that there is a bug in the 3g subsystem that prevents the phone from connecting to the towers, so it keeps retrying and wasting the battery. So it only affects 3G operators like AT&T, won't affect folks on Verizon.
Maybe the organic matter would `seed' life on Mars a-la Prometheus.
You are absolutely right. Old people are in general desperately lonely, and they often suppress `warning messages' for the company when being conned by a smart personable young person (or a cheerful voice at the end of the phone line).
The problem is really social isolation.
The father of one of my closest friends (in his 80s) was conned into investing close to $250,000.00 into a real estate venture in Latin America. He is not someone who comes across as a doddering old man. He is still alert, reasonably physically fit (for his age) and shows no signs of dementia. He had a successful career in business and survived all the vicious corporate politics of the huge corporation that he worked for, and retired with a healthy retirement account.
But pretty much everyone he knows is either dead or lives too far away for regular contact. His children live across the country and his spouse is no more. He has almost no living friends. Pretty much everyone whom he knew before he was 30 have passed on. The elderly do not make new friends very easily with their own age group. He goes for weeks without talking to a single soul (think of the guy from the movie `Up', that scenario is quite accurate). He is isolated, lonely, disenfranchised and desperate to feel relevant to society.
He was ripe for the picking by the smart young woman who knocked on his door in a business suit, heels and with a briefcase full of glossy brochures.
This is just part of life and how nature has programmed us. For better or for worse, women are the once who define the social rules of life. And this has always been the case. The root cause of this is that women are far more valuable to `the tribe' than men are, and society is reflexively programmed to protect the feminine interest. Trying to criticize this dynamic through a logical perspective is quite counter-productive. It is almost impossible for a man to criticize a woman, or indeed any aspect of female culture without looking like a whiny crybaby or a clueless idiot. A better thing would be to accept this and either move on or find ways to use this to your advantage.
A few other asymmetries to add to the list:
1. Porn for men is heavily regulated and looked down upon. It is almost impossible for a man to be known as a consumer of porn and still maintain a decent social standing. However, you can buy women's pornography at Walmart, and female judges openly discuss reading `50 shades of grey'.
2. A woman who uses her sexuality/command of the language etc to intimidate, manipulate or verbally castrate men is generally admired in the US culture. A man who shouts at a woman attains immediate jerkhood.
3. Most woman in a committed relationship use sex (or the withholding thereof) as a powerful tool to control the men in their life. How many times have you heard the phrase `he is going to sleep on the couch tonight?' This is generally considered an admirable thing in our culture.
4. Research indicates that women `stray' as much as men outside relationships. About 20% of men who think the are the fathers of their own kids are mistaken. However, it is men that are penalized by society and the legal system for failing to keep it in their pants.
The list goes on. Noone will be able to change any of this, unless you move to Islamic-style societies.
Citation please? According to Wikipedia, the only terrorist group to employ this tactic is Hamas, even though Israeli security does screen women -- which rather invalidates the theory.
Not correct. The Tamil Tigers and various other groups have used women suicide bombers. Rajiv Gandhi, the ex-Prime Minister of India was killed by female suicide bomber.
The Indian Christian Church (at least some of them) have a history of doing stuff like this; the aggressive conversion tactics they have adopted will put most US fundamentalist churches to shame. During a trip out there a few years ago, I witnessed a priest perform a "your Hindu god is false" demonstration in public field, accompanied by (I kid you not) an orchestra, with the entire performance amplified by huge speakers placed all around. The priest was dressed in robes reminiscent of a medieval Pope, and threw a Hindu Idol and a Cross into a big glass tank of water. The Hindu Idol sank, and the cross floated, and the guy exclaimed that this showed that the Hindu god was a false god. It was obvious that the idol was made of stone and the cross of wood. There was a huge crowd standing by, many of them ooh'd and aah'd. It looked like at least some of the ooh'ers were part of the performance. I went up to the priest and challenged him, and he started yelling at me. Some of his acolytes grabbed me and basically pushed me away from the place. I think I would surely have been beaten up if I had not been a foreigner.
I learned later that this sort of stuff is quite common in India. The church has started Christian ceremonies during mainstream Indian festivals like Diwali etc, during which time theys hold huge, extravagant masses to celebrate supposedly Christian events. If you are a student of history and want to know how "Christmas" ultimately ended up in December, this would be an object lesson.
The thing that amazed me was how tolerant the crowds were. Here was a guy who was yelling insults about the mainstream religion in a public place, and a vast crown just watched and let him have his say in peace. I doubt if this would happen in the US, let alone in any predominantly Islamic place.
Banning porn/hookers is basically pandering to women. Much of Woman's social influence and power derives from the sexual hold She has on Man. Pornography and hookers directly threaten that hold.
This is not very different from the govt trying to get the ACTA through to satisfy the movie industry.
Homeschooled tea-party supporter, huh?
This is just pure whitewashing and has been debunked multiple times.
As someone with a fair amount of experience in high tech and software development, I'd argue that everything you wrote about Indian programmers could equally apply to American ones. Still, for the sake of argument, let us assume that you are right. There is still one overwhelming reasons why managers (i.e. PHBs) prefer Indian programmers (either in the USA or India). That is: ego (or the lack of it).
Let us face it: Indians in general are happy to do what they are told. They do not grumble that the work is not challenging enough, or too demeaning. They tend to stick with the company even they are not doing the most sexy, glamorous work. They don't mind following software development processes laid down by management (and in fact, from what I've seen, many of them actually find that preferable to `genius' type mind-to-keyboard) programming. They do not mind working on bugfixes. They do not mind working under the direction of other, senior people, especially if the senior people are Americans.
Compare that to the average American engineer you find, especially in Silicon Valley. Let us postulate for the sake of argument that they are all programming gods. But I'd also argue that you won't find a more ego-centric, arrogant, inconsiderate bunch of prima donnas outside an Italian opera house. They are great at early stage startups as they sling together large amounts of code quickly. But they are absolutely terrible at dealing with the `grindwork' required to transform the technology into a product. They complain. They whine. They blackmail the management ("Institute that process and I'm gone!!"). They quit at inconvenient times anyway.
I'd argue that unless you are doing something at the super-high end, you probably don't need everyone at that talent level. For the average tech company, a mix of 20% Americans and 80% Indians would probably be more than adequate. The PHBs know this. That is why outsourcing will continue unless the govt puts a stop to it by some means.
Absolutely. If this is true, this may well be a deliberate act of provocation, intended to get Iran's military to do something stupid or over-reach, which would give the US the excuse it needs to start the war which the war machine desperately wants.
This sort of thing happens all the time; Country A wants to invade Country B, but needs a `good/just/patriotic' reason to sell home and abroad. Enter the agent provocateur.
America is the largest arms exporter in the world; the only reason the dictators don't provide American arms to their rank and file is because they are in general too expensive and perceived to be unreliable compared to AKs. But there are plenty of American-made heavy weapons found all over third-world killing zones.
Usually, when some right-wing guy brings up the `get a pair' taunt during some argument about some symbol/statement/law that offends somebody, I usually use the following to make them get the point.
1) Mosque at ground zero. If the Muslims have money to set up a mosque there, why is it your concern? You should just swallow your feelings, right?
2) Mapplethorpe Exhibit. Jesus in a jar of urine. You should just man up, right?
3) Gay parade in SF. Everybody should just STFU, right?
You get the picture. There are lots of such examples you can bring up.
Gnome 3.0 does not even start up on most systems with nVidia-based graphics cards. I've been trying to get it started to no avail. Nobody seems to know or care about the problem. I've had to switch to xfce.
Makes no sense to me; KDE4.x works fine, so does Gnome 2.x. X itself has no problem either for 2D, 3D or sound. Hope they have fixed this in 3.2.
This is an unfortunate consequence of Wall Street getting to call too many shots.
Wall Street does not want hands-on, promoted from within CEOs in any company, especially not publicly traded ones. It wants CEOs whose worldview is the same as theirs. The ideal CEO would buy into their worldview, and who would react to impulses that make sense to Wall Street and ignore all other information. Wall Street is particularly biased against folks with engineering training.
In general, stocks of any company where the CEO does not have connections to/is not beholden to Wall Street get punished and under-perform. This puts pressure on the board to hire `media darling' sociopathic CEOs.
In addition, such a CEO would make damned sure that there is no obvious internal candidate replacement as a survival strategy, by emasculating anyone who seems competent, or making sure they have no public profile whatsoever. There are plenty of academic studies that establish this.
There are still a few companies that have a strong tradition of training mgmt or promoting from within. GE is an obvious example.
Didn't both Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman run as tea-party candidates last year?
A good friend of mine recently interviewed at Google for a technical position and was turned down; a first in his career and a nasty shock for the man. This is a guy who has done fundamental work in his field, which is admittedly not web-programming but an underlying discipline that Google is now trying to get into. He said that he was interviewed by a bunch of fairly young programmers, a couple of whom admitted that they had not even read his resume. One of them said `My job is to ask you about search', and hit him with a bunch of questions about graph theory algorithms, even though he admitted that he had not done anything in that field and it was not really required for the specific group he was interviewing for. His opinion of the process was that it is biased VERY heavily towards people who are just out of school, since they are the only folks who will have such knowledge at their fingerprints. If that particular hiring process is representative, Google is hiring themselves a bunch of people that fit a specific paradigm, and blatantly screening out folks that don't fit. Time will tell if this serves them well in the long term.
They are probably cross-referencing the info provided by the user against their databases. I'm sure the personal data available to facebook is comprehensive. For example:
New user lists his/her address, gender. John Smith, Male, 13, lives at 20 Silicon Valley way, CA.
Facebook accesses data bases that tell it that the inhabitants of 20 Silicon Valley way are Peter, Mary, Linda & John, ages 35, 32, 13 & 10, respectively.
Facebook figures out that the new user is actually only 10.