Bah humbug. My problem with Firefox, and the problem of most of the other people complaining, is not memory usage. I have 3GB RAM in my laptop. Apart from Firefox I rarely use even 1 GB. I added the 3'rd GB to reduce my Firefox restarts from many a day to 1-2.
That memory usage is mostly leaks. Whenever I get Firefox to 1.5-2GB, and close down all tabs, so my only page open is about:blank, and I clear out my cache, and tune the Firefox settings to minimize caching etc., most of that memory never gets freed up.
Now, it's certainly true that there's a lot that could be improved to reduce memory usage further, but I'd be perfectly happy just to get rid of the leaks. It's not like I regularly "need" to have 80+ tabs open, and even if I do, my machine is perfectly usable with 80+ tabs open initially after a restart if/when that is what I want to do, and I'll still have plenty of memory free.
I've used Firefox since before it reached 1.0, and I've used it on Windows, Linux and MacOS X. On all of them I've had to restart Firefox more than once a day to avoid it from leaking so much memory it'd make the system trash to the point of almost locking up.
Trying to pretend this isn't a Firefox problem when it's the only application that cause this problem for me and a lot of other people won't work.
Saving and reopening in Firefox 2 at least is not something I want to do often, as it acts as if you reload all the pages in all the tabs.
On a lot of the sites I tend to have tabs open on, my sessions will have expired, and the tabs are pointless if I restart the browser. If Firefox did that automatically it would make the frequent restarts (I tend to restart a couple of times a day - when Firefox reaches 1.5GB to 2GB of memory on my Macbook Pro) even more painful.
As opposed to PHP which doesn't have threads at all? </em> <p> This misses the point. Thanks to the clean integration with Apache and reasonable performance, PHP doesn't need threading support to scale. Scaling Ruby web apps without resorting to threading at some point or other on the other hand is a lot harder in part because people are prepared to go to great lengths to avoid the startup overhead with Ruby. <p> <em> I really don't understand the obsession with threads. Why not just use processes? Running multiple processes allows you to fully utilize that dual core CPU of yours. Plus it doesn't involve messing with locks and conditional variables, an important source of bugs. </em> <p> I agree, to a point. But going multi-process instead of multi-threading suddenly increases the communication overhead significantly, and it's extra work. As a result people often avoid it, especially since threads is deceptively simple in Ruby, and going multi-process is not. <p> Also, the cost of going multi-process with Ruby is significant because of the gc - you WILL triger copy on write for a large set of your data very easily. Proper threading would have made that far less of an issue. <p> Just a cleanly re-entrant interpreter with threading outside of the interpreter would fix this problem with Ruby. <p> So to reiterate: The problem isn't Ruby the language, but the current Ruby interpreter. It violates almost every single principle of a well written interpreter. Luckily there's a lot of work going on to fix it, so hopefully this issue will go away reasonably quickly (and there's of course all the Ruby reimplementations), but for now it can't be ignored if you want to scale - you either have to deal with it (and there certainly are ways to deal with it, but it adds effort) or you pick another language. <p> I'm all for Ruby - I made the decision to start moving various components at Edgeio (the startup where I work) to Ruby a long time ago - but it only does Ruby disservice when lots of newcomers to Ruby hit the wall because they aren't aware of where the challenges will be and expect everything to be plain sailing. <p> It's often a rough awakening for people when they suddenly have to deal with the performance going to hell or things locking up because they do silly things (like calling the MySQL client library or any other C extension using bocking connect()'s or other syscalls from the same process that their webserver is running in for example) that would be considered perfectly reasonable in PHP code. For this problem to go away with Ruby it takes one of two things: Either a Ruby Apache module that is good enough to be able to compete with PHP in speed and where people won't worry about data leaks, OR fixing the threading. <p> We've hit far more scaling problems with Ruby than most peope will ever do, in part because of some of the things we were prepared to use Ruby for (we run Ruby for a lot of our backend and middleware components - our frontend is still PHP for now). And yes, we did end up having to go multi-process to get reasonable performance, because once we got to a certain number of threads combined with lots of IO, Ruby performance just goes through the floor. Add into that database drivers that don't work well with user level threading, and we had to bite the bullet. It cost a LOT of additional work that we wouldn't have had to deal with if the normal Ruby interpreter had used kernel level threads.
PHP is a bad language. It's a nasty mess, though it's gotten better with 5. What it has is simplicity, speed for web apps (compared to the current Ruby interpreter, and largely because the PHP interpreter is nicely integrated into Apache - this is not an inherent advantage of the language, but an implementation issue) and a huge number of built in, fast C extensions.
I've picked PHP for web apps too, though I much prefer Ruby as a language (not too thrilled about Rails, mostly because I have an allergy to frameworks - I much prefer picking components based on my needs).
What you say is right - it's far easier to fuck up in PHP than with Rails (but you can equally easily fuck up if you use Ruby alone), but one of my biggest problems with relying on Ruby for web apps right now is scalability. Yes, I know you can scale Rails, but the number of hoops you have to run through to get a Ruby based (regardless of Rails) application to scale is a hassle, and negate a lot of the things that make Ruby a great language for other things.
The threading model in Ruby, for example, is completely fucked up and kills performance if you need to do many threads and a lot of IO at the same time. It also makes things like failover harder whenever you have to depend on badly behaved C libraries (the MySQL client library is a pet hate of mine, since it can lock indefinitely in connect() for example, making you jump through hoops if you want to use it safely in a multithreaded Ruby app without risk of stalling).
Hopefully that gets taken care of in a future version, but it's a problem right now, and it's a larger problem because the interpreter isn't fully reentrant, making it harder to embed it and scale it with multiple threads outside the interpreter.
It doesn't stop me using Ruby, or recommending Ruby, but a lot of the Rails fanboys shoot themselves in the foot by ignoring the problems. They'd do Rails (and Ruby) a lot more favors by being honest about what's hard so people know what they go to. Problem is, not many of them actually know what's hard to do with Ruby, because few sites get the kind of traffic that will start making scaling further hard work.
It's hard work at various points with other languages and frameworks too, but the pain points are different, and what people are used to do with PHP is quite different from what they need to do to scale Ruby.
Given the number of wires and electronic stuff I have in my carry-on every time I fly (because I only go for a week at a time, and so I fly with only a carry-on to save time - I can pack a weeks worth of changes + my laptop, a few books and other stuff in it) to and from the US (about 6-8 times a year) I guess I'm lucky I haven't gotten shot yet.
Amazingly I haven't gotten searched on a single business trip yet. In fact the only time I've gotten searched at all in my 32 years was when leaving Oslo, Norway this year, by a very apologetic security guard who explained he was only filling the quota (they're required to search one in ten) and who folded everything neatly up and put it back in my bag again better packed than it was when he started. Apart from that, I've been pulled aside to pass me through one of the air puffers once at SFO, but that's it (another quota thing).
I don't know what to think. I obviously don't look like an evil genius, nor a muslim (ignoring the fact that there's been more than one white convert mixed up with extremist organizations already)... Is it too callous of me to believe being pale, blue eyed with short, clean cut blond hair is part of the reason I never get stopped? (I guess I'm jinxing myself and is in for a full body cavity search next time...)
By that account, "what if" my laptop was a bomb? Maybe I should be challenged about it every time I go travelling? My laptop has far more space for explosives than a little breadboard. For some reason people seem to expect bombers to make the bomb obvious, while airport security is tight enough that anybody except loonies who WANT attention drawn to their explosive would be able to hide it a lot better. And loonies wanting attention to it would've made it large and obviously a bomb.
This idea that "looks homemade == likely bomb" is stupid, and it reduces security by giving people the inverse idea that if it looks factory made it's almost certainly ok.
I travel a lot (about 60.000 miles so far this year and counting), and over the last couple of years I've noticed exactly that idea taking hold. It's not that long ago since I was regularly asked to turn my laptop when walking through security, for example. Now they just x-ray it, so all people need to do to get explosives through is make it look like a plausible laptop on x-ray, rather than make it look plausible AND make it appear to work.
Given the number of strip-poker games for the Commodore 64, I think we can safely say that people are pretty good at filling out the details with their own imagination...
They have moderate geometry complexity now because they are limited by the hardware. Just like games used to be all 2D because 3D was outside the reach of typical hardware, not because nobody wanted to make 3D games.
Actually, someone making an average salary in the UK will pay 16% income tax - the tax free allowance and the 10% band pulls it down quite a bit.
And because of the primary threshold on NI, they'll pay 8.8% national insurance (11% between the primary threshold and upper earnings limit).
So income tax + NI for an average earner is below 25%. Of the remaining 75%, a typical family easily spends a third on things like mortgages or rent and other things that are not subject to VAT. That leaves about 50% of their money that they pay 17.5% VAT on, or 8.75% of their income. Add it up, and the tax burden including VAT is more like ca. 34% total rounded up.
For comparison, a US average earner at $40k would pay about 19% federal income tax and social security tax (FICA) after deductions. Depending on which state they live in they'll pay anything from nothing (8 states) via 3% flat (Vermont) to around 7-8%, I believe (some states have higher max state income tax rates, but only at higher income levels). So that gives a tax range from 19% to around 26-27% plus sales taxes.
Of course these figures are not at all directly comparable to UK tax levels, since UK national insurance actually includes comprehensive health insurance and partial dental, to the point where only a tiny fraction of British taxpayers see any value in private health insurance.
But in any case, when you add up local taxes (in which case you need to take into account council tax in the UK too, though certain cities in the US have local taxes that can far outstrip the UK council tax), state taxes and federal taxes in the US, the UK and US have pretty similar tax levels even ignoring the fact that NI includes health insurance.
I did the math for myself a couple of years ago, and realized that moving to the US (which was an option due to work) would not have saved me any tax at all unless I moved to some backwater I wouldn't be prepared to live in - in fact I might have ended up paying slightly more, and I would have ended up paying a lot more if I wasn't in a field where full health insurance typically is provided as a benefit.
Fuel is a special case and has little to do with companies wanting to screw us - the fuel prices in the UK consists of about 70% taxes, and it's a conscious policy to tax fuel that high, as in most of the rest of Europe (though UK is towards the high end even in Europe).
Some countries tie their currency to the Euro too. And in fact, the USD is rapidly losing ground for international transfers to the Euro - if the current development continues, the Euro will be more widely used than the dollar in just a few years.
You can, of course, convert your yen directly to rupees, or your euros directly to yuan. But when you go to currency exchange to find out how much your currency is worth, the value will be quoted in dollars.
If you go to a US exchange, perhaps. The places I've seen quotes from currency markets they've been far more loking to quote prices in the local currency.
On the contrary, you'd probably find most European states would wholeheartedly support making sure all combatants get the same right to reasonable treatment and to a fair trial. After all, unless they get a trial we don't know whether they are guilty or not, as history is full of examples of governments abusing it's power when they are not subject to checks and balances.
The one party that would be against a new Geneva convention would be the US, because it would poke holes in the illusion your current government is trying to uphold that it actually has a legal basis for Guantanamo.
The EU regulations (which are implemented as law by the individual member states, and hence there are variations) for the most part a) define what is "personal information", b) require companies to delete personal information they collect that they don't have a genuine business need for (i.e. keeping financial records is a genuine business need - keeping your e-mail folders around after you've closed your e-mail account is not), c) require companies to track where they got someones personal information to allow customers to track down someone who's illegally sharing their information, d) require companies to, for a fee, let anyone know what information the company holds about them so that they can demand it deleted or demand it corrected (subject to laws and regulations - i.e. you can't order a company to delete details of what you owe them for example), e) require express consent to share a customer private information (i.e. the customer needs to be asked a question or presented with a checkbox etc. allowing them to opt in or opt of having their information shared) except as required to fulfill their obligations to the customer, f) require companies to take reasonable measures to protect the data and ensure only staff that need access has it.
In my experience, it's really not particularly onerous, and very few customers will EVER make use of their rights to ask for information or have it deleted. If they do, assuming your system holds the information in a sensible way, it is fairly simple to comply. Apart from that the main restriction is that you can't actually buy and sell customer information unless the customers have consented to the usage. That part I can see Google hating - I always carefully consider whether or not I trust a company not to shaft me enough to let them share my data, and generally I'm far more protective about my e-mail address and phone than about my postal address.
I've never noticed the bureaucracy Google speak of, and I've dealt with privacy surrounding billing systems in multiple EU countries. What the EU regulations demand is good practice anyway for the most part, and apart from a few unscrupulous companies that would happily sell customer information without consent, most people really aren't affected much.
The answer to that is to collect the receipt in ballot boxes after the voter has verified it is correct. It gives a paper trail that is a lot harder to fix and even harder to fix to match the electronic count. Then you do as others have suggested and do samples of the paper trail. If the samples and the electronic vote doesn't agree, you have two choices: accept the paper votes, or do another election.
Of course 15nm is 0.015 microns, not 15,000. And according to the site you refer to, they make no claim of stopping viruses with the filter - to do that you need to add a chlorine solution to the water. I don't know about you, but I don't exactly enjoy the taste of chlorine.
More like $50k per month fully loaded based on actual experience hiring Chinese developers - the Chinese market is heating up quickly. Especially for people with even rudimentary English skills.
For most companies, MS Project is "too high end" in the sense that they only use a fraction of the capabilities of Project. Of course it's not enough for large scale project management, but most places I've seen Project used it's been used to "draw" a GANTT chart, rather than as a real project management application.
This is nonsense. First of all, it's a Trojan. It tricks people into running a program. It's trivial to get root assuming the person who runs it ever su's etc., for any distro where the shell runs user specified scripts on startup, but root access isn't even needed. The reason this isn't happening more is far more a lack of interest from the Trojan writers and the experience level of the user base than any inherent advantage. If you move the users that run these Trojans on Windows over to Linux, people will write them for Linux and these users will run them all the same.
Secondly, the machines that are infected are peoples desktop computers that they run the Trojan on, not their servers, so your numbers have nothing to do with reality.
It depends on how skilled workers a job demands. Low skilled jobs will always go to the place it's cheapest to have them carried out (other things than just wages play in), and it's a long time before there's any chance of salaries evening out in those type of positions. In IT, however, India is seeing salaries grow at many times the average in the west, and so the cost effectiveness of outsourcing to India is rapidly reducing. Many companies have started looking at China (we have people in China, partly for cost but also partly because China is our second largest market) with the language problems that cause, as well as Russia and Eastern Europe, and even Africa. The problem is that apart from China and Russia, there aren't really any huge untapped resources of people highly educated in IT related skills, and so salaries are starting to rise rapidly in many of these other markets too.
Indeed, many Indian companies have started outsourcing elsewhere.
We're still far off from reaching a balance, but India will stop being a threat because of outsourcing within the next 10-20 years, I think, because they are seeing double the pressure on salaries: Their own software industry is growing too, and so unless they do something truly dramatic to increase the workforce in the IT fields, the main downward salary pressure in the west is going to shift to other markets.
How long it will take to drive up IT salaries in China and Russia is not something I'd want to start guessing at. But I don't exactly fear for my ability to find a job. If you are in low skilled IT jobs, sure, then there's a very good reason to update your skill set.
However, if you read the article you quoted vs. the article on the CoS front site, you'll notice that the one you cited gives plenty space to how the commissions report caused a major uproar, and how it resulted in the government removing the list in question from the final report and not taking a stance on it. The CoS article tries to make it seem as if this result was left standing uncontested, while in fact it appears to have had no impact on policy.
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You're lucky. Firefox on my laptop is currently hovering around 600MB with 8 tabs open, and this is after restarting it only a few hours ago.
That memory usage is mostly leaks. Whenever I get Firefox to 1.5-2GB, and close down all tabs, so my only page open is about:blank, and I clear out my cache, and tune the Firefox settings to minimize caching etc., most of that memory never gets freed up.
Now, it's certainly true that there's a lot that could be improved to reduce memory usage further, but I'd be perfectly happy just to get rid of the leaks. It's not like I regularly "need" to have 80+ tabs open, and even if I do, my machine is perfectly usable with 80+ tabs open initially after a restart if/when that is what I want to do, and I'll still have plenty of memory free.
Trying to pretend this isn't a Firefox problem when it's the only application that cause this problem for me and a lot of other people won't work.
On a lot of the sites I tend to have tabs open on, my sessions will have expired, and the tabs are pointless if I restart the browser. If Firefox did that automatically it would make the frequent restarts (I tend to restart a couple of times a day - when Firefox reaches 1.5GB to 2GB of memory on my Macbook Pro) even more painful.
As opposed to PHP which doesn't have threads at all?
</em>
<p>
This misses the point. Thanks to the clean integration with Apache and reasonable performance, PHP doesn't need threading support to scale. Scaling Ruby web apps without resorting to threading at some point or other on the other hand is a lot harder in part because people are prepared to go to great lengths to avoid the startup overhead with Ruby.
<p>
<em>
I really don't understand the obsession with threads. Why not just use processes? Running multiple processes allows you to fully utilize that dual core CPU of yours. Plus it doesn't involve messing with locks and conditional variables, an important source of bugs.
</em>
<p>
I agree, to a point. But going multi-process instead of multi-threading suddenly increases the communication overhead significantly, and it's extra work. As a result people often avoid it, especially since threads is deceptively simple in Ruby, and going multi-process is not.
<p>
Also, the cost of going multi-process with Ruby is significant because of the gc - you WILL triger copy on write for a large set of your data very easily. Proper threading would have made that far less of an issue.
<p>
Just a cleanly re-entrant interpreter with threading outside of the interpreter would fix this problem with Ruby.
<p>
So to reiterate: The problem isn't Ruby the language, but the current Ruby interpreter. It violates almost every single principle of a well written interpreter. Luckily there's a lot of work going on to fix it, so hopefully this issue will go away reasonably quickly (and there's of course all the Ruby reimplementations), but for now it can't be ignored if you want to scale - you either have to deal with it (and there certainly are ways to deal with it, but it adds effort) or you pick another language.
<p>
I'm all for Ruby - I made the decision to start moving various components at Edgeio (the startup where I work) to Ruby a long time ago - but it only does Ruby disservice when lots of newcomers to Ruby hit the wall because they aren't aware of where the challenges will be and expect everything to be plain sailing.
<p>
It's often a rough awakening for people when they suddenly have to deal with the performance going to hell or things locking up because they do silly things (like calling the MySQL client library or any other C extension using bocking connect()'s or other syscalls from the same process that their webserver is running in for example) that would be considered perfectly reasonable in PHP code. For this problem to go away with Ruby it takes one of two things: Either a Ruby Apache module that is good enough to be able to compete with PHP in speed and where people won't worry about data leaks, OR fixing the threading.
<p>
We've hit far more scaling problems with Ruby than most peope will ever do, in part because of some of the things we were prepared to use Ruby for (we run Ruby for a lot of our backend and middleware components - our frontend is still PHP for now). And yes, we did end up having to go multi-process to get reasonable performance, because once we got to a certain number of threads combined with lots of IO, Ruby performance just goes through the floor. Add into that database drivers that don't work well with user level threading, and we had to bite the bullet. It cost a LOT of additional work that we wouldn't have had to deal with if the normal Ruby interpreter had used kernel level threads.
I've picked PHP for web apps too, though I much prefer Ruby as a language (not too thrilled about Rails, mostly because I have an allergy to frameworks - I much prefer picking components based on my needs).
What you say is right - it's far easier to fuck up in PHP than with Rails (but you can equally easily fuck up if you use Ruby alone), but one of my biggest problems with relying on Ruby for web apps right now is scalability. Yes, I know you can scale Rails, but the number of hoops you have to run through to get a Ruby based (regardless of Rails) application to scale is a hassle, and negate a lot of the things that make Ruby a great language for other things.
The threading model in Ruby, for example, is completely fucked up and kills performance if you need to do many threads and a lot of IO at the same time. It also makes things like failover harder whenever you have to depend on badly behaved C libraries (the MySQL client library is a pet hate of mine, since it can lock indefinitely in connect() for example, making you jump through hoops if you want to use it safely in a multithreaded Ruby app without risk of stalling).
Hopefully that gets taken care of in a future version, but it's a problem right now, and it's a larger problem because the interpreter isn't fully reentrant, making it harder to embed it and scale it with multiple threads outside the interpreter.
It doesn't stop me using Ruby, or recommending Ruby, but a lot of the Rails fanboys shoot themselves in the foot by ignoring the problems. They'd do Rails (and Ruby) a lot more favors by being honest about what's hard so people know what they go to. Problem is, not many of them actually know what's hard to do with Ruby, because few sites get the kind of traffic that will start making scaling further hard work.
It's hard work at various points with other languages and frameworks too, but the pain points are different, and what people are used to do with PHP is quite different from what they need to do to scale Ruby.
Amazingly I haven't gotten searched on a single business trip yet. In fact the only time I've gotten searched at all in my 32 years was when leaving Oslo, Norway this year, by a very apologetic security guard who explained he was only filling the quota (they're required to search one in ten) and who folded everything neatly up and put it back in my bag again better packed than it was when he started. Apart from that, I've been pulled aside to pass me through one of the air puffers once at SFO, but that's it (another quota thing).
I don't know what to think. I obviously don't look like an evil genius, nor a muslim (ignoring the fact that there's been more than one white convert mixed up with extremist organizations already)... Is it too callous of me to believe being pale, blue eyed with short, clean cut blond hair is part of the reason I never get stopped? (I guess I'm jinxing myself and is in for a full body cavity search next time...)
This idea that "looks homemade == likely bomb" is stupid, and it reduces security by giving people the inverse idea that if it looks factory made it's almost certainly ok.
I travel a lot (about 60.000 miles so far this year and counting), and over the last couple of years I've noticed exactly that idea taking hold. It's not that long ago since I was regularly asked to turn my laptop when walking through security, for example. Now they just x-ray it, so all people need to do to get explosives through is make it look like a plausible laptop on x-ray, rather than make it look plausible AND make it appear to work.
At least the article does not in any way claim that he didn't have authority to post the picture.
Given the number of strip-poker games for the Commodore 64, I think we can safely say that people are pretty good at filling out the details with their own imagination...
They have moderate geometry complexity now because they are limited by the hardware. Just like games used to be all 2D because 3D was outside the reach of typical hardware, not because nobody wanted to make 3D games.
And because of the primary threshold on NI, they'll pay 8.8% national insurance (11% between the primary threshold and upper earnings limit).
So income tax + NI for an average earner is below 25%. Of the remaining 75%, a typical family easily spends a third on things like mortgages or rent and other things that are not subject to VAT. That leaves about 50% of their money that they pay 17.5% VAT on, or 8.75% of their income. Add it up, and the tax burden including VAT is more like ca. 34% total rounded up.
For comparison, a US average earner at $40k would pay about 19% federal income tax and social security tax (FICA) after deductions. Depending on which state they live in they'll pay anything from nothing (8 states) via 3% flat (Vermont) to around 7-8%, I believe (some states have higher max state income tax rates, but only at higher income levels). So that gives a tax range from 19% to around 26-27% plus sales taxes.
Of course these figures are not at all directly comparable to UK tax levels, since UK national insurance actually includes comprehensive health insurance and partial dental, to the point where only a tiny fraction of British taxpayers see any value in private health insurance.
But in any case, when you add up local taxes (in which case you need to take into account council tax in the UK too, though certain cities in the US have local taxes that can far outstrip the UK council tax), state taxes and federal taxes in the US, the UK and US have pretty similar tax levels even ignoring the fact that NI includes health insurance.
I did the math for myself a couple of years ago, and realized that moving to the US (which was an option due to work) would not have saved me any tax at all unless I moved to some backwater I wouldn't be prepared to live in - in fact I might have ended up paying slightly more, and I would have ended up paying a lot more if I wasn't in a field where full health insurance typically is provided as a benefit.
Fuel is a special case and has little to do with companies wanting to screw us - the fuel prices in the UK consists of about 70% taxes, and it's a conscious policy to tax fuel that high, as in most of the rest of Europe (though UK is towards the high end even in Europe).
You can, of course, convert your yen directly to rupees, or your euros directly to yuan. But when you go to currency exchange to find out how much your currency is worth, the value will be quoted in dollars.
If you go to a US exchange, perhaps. The places I've seen quotes from currency markets they've been far more loking to quote prices in the local currency.
The one party that would be against a new Geneva convention would be the US, because it would poke holes in the illusion your current government is trying to uphold that it actually has a legal basis for Guantanamo.
For me, the only two missing features is quicker startup and better performance during use... I couldn't care less about anything else they might add.
In my experience, it's really not particularly onerous, and very few customers will EVER make use of their rights to ask for information or have it deleted. If they do, assuming your system holds the information in a sensible way, it is fairly simple to comply. Apart from that the main restriction is that you can't actually buy and sell customer information unless the customers have consented to the usage. That part I can see Google hating - I always carefully consider whether or not I trust a company not to shaft me enough to let them share my data, and generally I'm far more protective about my e-mail address and phone than about my postal address.
I've never noticed the bureaucracy Google speak of, and I've dealt with privacy surrounding billing systems in multiple EU countries. What the EU regulations demand is good practice anyway for the most part, and apart from a few unscrupulous companies that would happily sell customer information without consent, most people really aren't affected much.
The answer to that is to collect the receipt in ballot boxes after the voter has verified it is correct. It gives a paper trail that is a lot harder to fix and even harder to fix to match the electronic count. Then you do as others have suggested and do samples of the paper trail. If the samples and the electronic vote doesn't agree, you have two choices: accept the paper votes, or do another election.
Of course 15nm is 0.015 microns, not 15,000. And according to the site you refer to, they make no claim of stopping viruses with the filter - to do that you need to add a chlorine solution to the water. I don't know about you, but I don't exactly enjoy the taste of chlorine.
More like $50k per month fully loaded based on actual experience hiring Chinese developers - the Chinese market is heating up quickly. Especially for people with even rudimentary English skills.
For most companies, MS Project is "too high end" in the sense that they only use a fraction of the capabilities of Project. Of course it's not enough for large scale project management, but most places I've seen Project used it's been used to "draw" a GANTT chart, rather than as a real project management application.
Secondly, the machines that are infected are peoples desktop computers that they run the Trojan on, not their servers, so your numbers have nothing to do with reality.
Indeed, many Indian companies have started outsourcing elsewhere.
We're still far off from reaching a balance, but India will stop being a threat because of outsourcing within the next 10-20 years, I think, because they are seeing double the pressure on salaries: Their own software industry is growing too, and so unless they do something truly dramatic to increase the workforce in the IT fields, the main downward salary pressure in the west is going to shift to other markets.
How long it will take to drive up IT salaries in China and Russia is not something I'd want to start guessing at. But I don't exactly fear for my ability to find a job. If you are in low skilled IT jobs, sure, then there's a very good reason to update your skill set.
However, if you read the article you quoted vs. the article on the CoS front site, you'll notice that the one you cited gives plenty space to how the commissions report caused a major uproar, and how it resulted in the government removing the list in question from the final report and not taking a stance on it. The CoS article tries to make it seem as if this result was left standing uncontested, while in fact it appears to have had no impact on policy.
Quaker has nothing to do with the religious group, and since 2001 it's actually been part of Pepsico.