Any robust process DOES involve the ability to recount. It is much easier and faster to simply make it possible to recount than to spend the effort required to make the initial count tamper proof.
It is sufficient that the "verifiable voter trail" consists of an anonymous piece of paper stating your votes, that immediately gets put into a sealed ballot box together with everyone elses votes. As long as you have seen and confirmed that the paper shows the same vote you entered in the machine, and the ballot box gets sealed in front of independent witnesses and is reasonably tamper resistant, you have a verifiable voter trail. There is no need to be able to track a vote back to an individual, and indeed it shouldn't be possible for just the reasons you mentioned.
Your argument is pure bullshit. If you are suspected in a serious terror investigation, and don't have any reason to distrust the motive of the government officials involved, and they've shown they have followed the appropriate steps, then presumably you would happily hand over your keys, let them have a look and be on their way.
That isn't what encryption is meant to protect you against. Encryption is there to protect you against unauthorised snooping. As when your president decides he's above the law and allows spying with no judicial oversight. Or when some rogue element somewhere with power decides it's his duty to track dissidents and personal opponents (think J. Edgar Hoover). Or when some criminal decides that your latest idea is worth stealing, or some details of your past you're discussing with a close friend can be used to blackmail you.
If you resist handing over your keys when presented with documents proving the government has gone through proper channels and obtained permission from the right authorities to look for evidence of an actual crime, then you should get in trouble. But there are plenty of valid reason for normal citizens to protect their privacy.
If anything, a government concerned about the security of its citizens should encourage it - bad guys can always use encryption anyway, and unencrypted communication between people who aren't criminals is primarily a benefit for criminals, within or outside government, not for genuine government needs.
What you are saying makes no sense. The monarch doesn't talk about politics, and doesn't take any decisions. So why does it matter if she's "un-corruptable" etc.? For your information, the honours list for instance is compiled by civil servants, ok'd by the prime ministers office and THEN presented to the queen. It is "hers" in name only.
It's the same for all of her "powers" - they are in name only.
Are you saying an elected representative can't manage to be a figurehead with no powers?
So Israel should have been first then, holding the all time record in ignoring UN resolutions.
But in any case you have an extremely twisted idea of the obligations of UN members. The UN charter does not allow pre-emptive strikes except in self defence against imminent attacks. If you believe even for a second that Iraq in any way was a threat to the US at the time of the attack, then you seriously need your head examined.
One of the key concerns about a missile-defense system is control (or lack of it) and the effect it has on the principle of mutually assured destruction. The rest of the world don't want to be in a situation where the US is free to use nuclear weapons without the treat of retaliation (nor would we like China, Russia or any other nuclear power to be in the same situation).
A missile defense system that is guaranteed to protect everyone would certainly be welcomed by most people. But that would require shared control, as nobody would trust it if control was in the hands of a single power.
This is exactly the same issue as with the GPS alternatives - practically nobody are willing to trust the US to not use these capabilities selectively. While Europeans are unlikely to think the US will selectively degrade GPS (or a missile defense system) against us, many of us do consider it likely the US will use such systems to selectively disadvantage countries we may consider friendly or may not support military action against.
Not leaving control over such systems in the hand of another country - no matter how friendly - is prudent planning. You don't know if they'll still be as friendly 10-20 years down the line, or if you have different strategic objectives that may lead to dramatically different approaches to third parties.
You can certainly reduce the number of tests quite dramatically. Someone else pointed out that you only need to check up to the square root.
Of course, if you do know all preceeding primes, then it's just a matter of restricting your test to just that sequence, as everything else by definition have smaller prime factors you'll test against.
If not there's a bit more work, but you can still save a lot over brute forcing it.
If you start at 2 and work your way upward, and for as long as you know the next prime up, you'd only need to test with the next prime.
After that, you can still discard tests with any numbers that can trivially easily be shown to have small prime factors without even trying a division, like all even numbers, all numbers ending in 5 etc.. There are quite a few rules that can be added to just immediately skip a lot of numbers as you're iterating upwards with quite cheap logic.
You can also test the number you will use to test your potential prime by first testing that against a set of small primes (apart from the ones you've already discounted by not generating the test numbers), to quickly discard those test numbers before you attempt a huge expensive division. It's also possible to derive relatively simple rules to check for divisibility of many small primes that may be far cheaper than trying an actual division once you start getting up to reasonably large numbers.
The method of discaring tests against numbers divisible by a set of small primes is known as the Sieve of Eratosthenes... I think there are a few alternative methods - the main benefit of the sieve of Eratosthenes is that the basic algorithm extremely simple and still a vast improvement over brute forcing.
Hitler very much used religion for his own ends, yes, which was exactly why I pointed to it. But he did so by coopting established christianity in Germany.
I stand by my statement that I see him as a flawed leader more than an inherently evil one. If you read Mao, he certainly had authoritarian streaks, but his core ideology was still founded on putting the people first, and ultimately a belief in democracy. If you read Stalin on the other hand (or Hitler), the attitude is very different - there may be the odd nod to the "people", but the perspective is very much inversed, from putting the people first to seeing people as expendable resources of the state, and the party as the final arbiter of what the "people" really needs.
The policies Mao implemented and the decisions he took after the revolution, in order to try and implement his ideas, very much suffered from many of the same problems as Lenins - they both attempted to force through changes based on very flawed ideas of the consequences.
The end result is still the same - lots of people dead. A more nuanced view of Mao doesn't change that, and shouldn't be used to excuse his failures as a leader - only to explain the differences and contradictions between Mao as a leader and Mao as an ideologist.
It's mostly interesting for what it teaches about how far China today is from the original ideologies of the revolutionary movement. It's fairly bland - it consists entirely of quotes from Mao's books and speeches, most of them fairly vague, generic and for the most part not particularly controversial.
Unless you're living in a void and not critically evaluating what you read, Mao's little red IS harmless.
Mao certainly caused a lot of deaths, but contrary to leaders like Stalin, Mao was more a flawed leader that screwed up badly than someone whose core ideology involved mass murder, and if you read the little red book you will see that reflected in a lot of what he is saying.
Most people reading it will find themselves agreeing with a lot of it, either because it is vague enough so as to be more or less apolitical, or because it plain makes sense. Most of those same people will probably never like Mao, nor will they they ever become apologists for what he did. Even the Chinese Communist Party readily admits that Mao had many flaws and that many of his policies should never have been carried out because they were disasterous and caused vast numbers of deaths that could have been avoided with better leadership.
But you will also likely find that many of the things in Maos little red book are things you can agree with exactly because it contains admonishions of how to act that the Chinese Communist Party really ought to be learning from.
A few examples (NOTE: There are certainly far more controversial quotes too - particularly regarding the Leninist concept of democratic centralism - I'm not trying to whitewash Mao, just to show a side most peopke don't know - for the other side, read the book):
"A proper measure of democracy should be put into effect in the army, chiefly by abolishing the feudal practice of bullying and beating and by having officers and men share weal and woe.".
And: " With regard to economic democracy, the representatives elected by the soldiers must be ensured the right to assist (but not to bypass) the company leadership in managing the company's supplies and mess."
And: "We must not be complacent over any success. We should check our complacency and constantly criticize our shortcomings, just as we should wash our faces or sweep the floor every day to remove the dirt and keep them clean."
And: "We should be modest and prudent, guard against arrogance and rashness, and serve the Chinese people heart and soul. . .."
And: " Our duty is to hold ourselves responsible to the people. Every word, every act and every policy must conform to the people's interests, and if mistakes occur, they must be corrected -- that is what being responsible to the people means."
The biggest "danger" the little red book constitutes is that it might make some readers see the difference between communist ideology and what has been practiced in the name of communism in totalitarian states - the greatest bulwark against support for communist ideas today is that most people still think of countries like China, North Korea or the old Soviet Union as representative of communist ideology, rather than as dictatures that flagrantly abuse it's symbolism and phrases. How many people today consider the Inquisition representative of Christian ideas (I don't, and I'm an atheist), or for that matter consider Hitlers support for the church as proof churches are evil?
However, the Chinese Communist Party is really the organisation that should worry most about people actually reading and understanding Mao and realising just exactly how far from the goals of the Chinese revolution they have moved.
They better hope the Chinese people don't start taking to heart quotes like the ones above, or the following one, and start expecting for them to be followed:
" Every comrade must be brought to understand that the supreme test of the words and deeds of a Communist is whether they conform with the highest interests and enjoy the support of the overwhelming majority of the people."
If you'd like to see for yourself what it actually says, all of Mao's little red book is available online
Yet we already do filter by interests. Most of us pick newspapers biased to our political views, TV channels that feed us programming that match our interests, go to restaurants that serves the type of food we already know we like etc.
We experiment mainly in two ways: Where one preference means we come in contact with someone who doesn't share our preferences in another area - for instance meeting friends who share an interest in programming but eat different food than me might get me to try eating something new -, and general curiosity; wondering if there isn't "something else" out there.
I share some of your worries. I am sure some people will self-reinforce many traits much more than today. And I am concerned that society will become much more resistant to change, and much more polarised, if everyone gets their own version of "truth" and can limit their exposure to other thinking much more efficiently.
On the other hand, I try to be hopeful that most people will still be curious, and will still rely on where some of their interests intersect with someone otherwise very different to try new things.
That's what the edit history, the discussion page for each entry, and critical thinking is for. At least the latter is something that this experiment shows you should apply with Britannica as well, and the two former aren't available with Britannica. That said, in any case you should look up primary sources before you rely on information in any encyclopedia for anything important.
At least with Britannica you are assured that the information is gathered by people who get paid to do this as a job and the information is validated by fact checkers
And this experiment demonstrated that despite that their error rate wasn't much better than Wikipedia for the science subjects chosen. So what is your point?
You're assuming they'll vent the steam, which wouldn't make sense - you'd have to get people to fill water all the time - it would make more sense to feed it through a condenser and back into the engine. Using condensers for steam engines have a long history, and works well.
If what you're saying was true and relevant the salaries wouldn't be rising nearly as quickly in Bangalore - companies would just spread their net and hire further away. That in itself shows that it isn't that easy.
The problem is twofold: Lack of infrastructure, and (more importantly) lack of skilled labor. Manufacturing jobs are already outsourced to cheaper locations than India exactly because there's no problem finding people that can do the jobs.
Engineering jobs and other higher level jobs, however, isn't something that just requires language skills. I'm by no means hinting that Indians can't do them well - obviously they can, and many of them do, and more will, but training sufficient numbers to fuel that kind of growth fast enough to contain salary levels doesn't work (if it did, then salary levels in Bangalore wouldn't have been rising as quickly as they have, which is why I mentioned it in the first place)
To add to that: if the salaries don't continue to rise, it will be extremely hard to draw sufficient number of candidates.
Sure, outsourcing will spread - major companies are already looking to Russia and China, despite the language difficulties. But the reason they are doing so is because they aren't getting the savings they used to in India (in Bangalore or elsewhere) which was seen as a low hanging fruit.
No doubt India will continue to get jobs that require high skill levels, but demand is exceeding supply and so the balance gets redressed by rising salaries.
That won't change until either the supply dramatically increases - which is a process that takes decades, not years, or until salaries are high enough to remove a lot of the economic incentive for moving more jobs.
You also completely missed my point about software exports. India has a large number of companies that operate offshore engineering centers for companies that don't want the hassle of operating offshore departments themselves.
Many of these companies will want to find more than one leg to stand on. Even more so as salaries rise enough to make their offshoring ventures less profitable.
Many of them will find using dead time or unallocated engineers on creating products a viable supplementary revenue source.
Many people who are gaining experience working in these companies will eventually start their own companies, and at least some of them will want to develop their own products rather than working on other peoples products.
Some of these companies are bound to eventually get succesfull at exporting software from India, and that I was pointing out.
Ultimately much of this will translate into job creation also in the US and Europe as these companies face customer demands for on site training and support and face to face access to customer facing engineering personell.
Even majorer off-shorers like Wipro boast of their customer proximity - gained by having thousands of engineers on payroll in Europe, USA and Japan to support their off-shoring business, which is a pretty good indication that we'll start seeing the same from Indian startups hoping to make it big.
The representatives of the European parliament are elected directly, but the European parliament can't make law (though it has to vote on laws proposed, and can block/slow the process down or change the proposals, subject to a lot of hassle, which is how the software patents directive got killed off last time).
The commission (the executive branch of the EU government) which is generally the organ proposing laws is appointed by the heads of state of the member states of the EU - one appointee each, but must be approved by parliament (if parliament refuses approval, the heads of state will generally have to propose replacements, which has happened a few times - I don't know what would happen in the case of a stand off between the two).
The council of ministers consists of the ministers of the member states, and generally sits in groups of their respective areas (like when the agriculture ministers were used to try to push the patent directive through the council)
The council generally has the most power in terms of making law. The commission second, as they prepare the initial proposal. The parliament is a weak third.
The reason for that is that the council represents the governments of the member states, that still formally are sovereign nations. The council acts with the authority of those governments.
Thus the position of the parliament is comparable to the position of Congress in the US under the Articles of Confederation (note to those not familiar with US history: this has nothing to do with the Confederacy of the southern states around the civil war), before the constitution was enacted and the US became a federal republic. You also have the same pressures towards creating a more cohesive central government with actual power to enforce decisions as what lead to the US constitution.
(Of course it's highly contentious amongst people in the EU whether the EU should become a state or not - considering the ridiculous over-engineering of the proposed constitution i think we can be very happy it's moving slowly)
And I use Gnome because I feel KDE looks like what Windows would have looked like on Linux... As much as I love eye candy in a GUI: The moment you feel a need to spend time customizing the UI, it has failed.
That's the main reason I use Gnome. I am comfortable with the default Fedora packaged RPM's with practically no customisation. I set a desktop background, turn off the menu bar in gnome-terminal, and change the default font size, and that's about it.
With KDE I immediately get an urge to start changing every damn setting to try to coerce it to act the way I want it.
I realise this is a matter of personal taste, but to me it boils down to: What are the relative ratios of KDE and Gnome users that happily do less than 5 minutes of customisation of the desktop before they feel settled in on a new machine?
Get used to it. This is Linus. He's never bothered trying to be a politician. The guy just want to do his thing, and won't give a shit if it offends you that he states his opinion. I disagree with him a lot of the time (including on KDE vs. Gnome) but I fully respect the fact that he doesn't try to be a polished leader.
Linus leads because his decisions regarding the kernel are pragmatic enough to work, nothing else. That accomplishment means we'll listen to what we have to say, but it certainly doesn't mean people will automatically agree with him, as countless flamewars on the kernel list can attest to.
If he thinks Gnome is crap, then fine, it's his choice. Personally I think KDE is crap, and simply won't consider using it because it feels like a less polished version of Windows (and using Windows makes me feel crippled and ready to cry).
I don't mean this as flamebait - I'm know many KDE users feel the same about Gnome, and that's their right. In either case it's mostly subjective ideas about how a UI should work on both sides.
I'm sure there are objectively measurable differences in quality too, if you look closely enough, but I simply don't care - the subjective differences in usability for me far outweigh anything else.
For me, it's more important that the Gnome and KDE teams work together on ensuring interoperability than ending up with a single desktop (and they have done that a lot of the time, with the freedesktop.org specs. implemented by both for instance).
All of this is just temporary and here is why: Each time these countries start eating into a new segment of Western economies, they move towards equalising salary levels.
Engineers in Bangalore for instance have seen their salaries skyrocket over the last 5 years, and as a result they are becoming less competitive and companies are increasingly looking at other parts of India to outsource to, and to cheaper countries.
But it has also meant that many companies that might have considered offshoring at the prices 5 years ago don't see that high an incentive any more.
Eventually there will be an equilibrium. These kinds of positions simply aren't comparable to minimum wage manufacturing jobs that require little to no training and can be done by anyone, and so they contribute to massively drive up salary levels in the areas companies outsource to.
The trickle down effects may even get sufficient to start driving up overall prices in these countries - it certainly has driven up prices for housing for instance in many outsourcing hotspots.
The net result is that while I can understand that some people are concerned for their jobs, this won't cause an implosion of the job market for engineers in industrialised countries - for that the cost of engineers in the main outsourcing locations is rising too fast, and most alternatives have "problems" such as lack of people with sufficient skills in English.
Ultimately, for the right people this is also an opportunity: While the Indian software industry is still mostly offshoring based, for instance, the growing IT sector in India also means the opportunities for Indian based software houses are increasing. Ultimately we'll be seeing increasing amounts software exports from companies that will need people to work on site with customers in the west - there's always work that can't be done remotely.
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Any robust process DOES involve the ability to recount. It is much easier and faster to simply make it possible to recount than to spend the effort required to make the initial count tamper proof.
At least you don't have the Monster Raving Loony Party on your ballots. (Yes, they do actually contest the odd seat here in the UK every election...)
It is sufficient that the "verifiable voter trail" consists of an anonymous piece of paper stating your votes, that immediately gets put into a sealed ballot box together with everyone elses votes. As long as you have seen and confirmed that the paper shows the same vote you entered in the machine, and the ballot box gets sealed in front of independent witnesses and is reasonably tamper resistant, you have a verifiable voter trail. There is no need to be able to track a vote back to an individual, and indeed it shouldn't be possible for just the reasons you mentioned.
That isn't what encryption is meant to protect you against. Encryption is there to protect you against unauthorised snooping. As when your president decides he's above the law and allows spying with no judicial oversight. Or when some rogue element somewhere with power decides it's his duty to track dissidents and personal opponents (think J. Edgar Hoover). Or when some criminal decides that your latest idea is worth stealing, or some details of your past you're discussing with a close friend can be used to blackmail you.
If you resist handing over your keys when presented with documents proving the government has gone through proper channels and obtained permission from the right authorities to look for evidence of an actual crime, then you should get in trouble. But there are plenty of valid reason for normal citizens to protect their privacy.
If anything, a government concerned about the security of its citizens should encourage it - bad guys can always use encryption anyway, and unencrypted communication between people who aren't criminals is primarily a benefit for criminals, within or outside government, not for genuine government needs.
It's the same for all of her "powers" - they are in name only.
Are you saying an elected representative can't manage to be a figurehead with no powers?
Your point being? ICBM's with nuclear warheads hardly needs GPS to do sufficient damage.
But in any case you have an extremely twisted idea of the obligations of UN members. The UN charter does not allow pre-emptive strikes except in self defence against imminent attacks. If you believe even for a second that Iraq in any way was a threat to the US at the time of the attack, then you seriously need your head examined.
A missile defense system that is guaranteed to protect everyone would certainly be welcomed by most people. But that would require shared control, as nobody would trust it if control was in the hands of a single power.
This is exactly the same issue as with the GPS alternatives - practically nobody are willing to trust the US to not use these capabilities selectively. While Europeans are unlikely to think the US will selectively degrade GPS (or a missile defense system) against us, many of us do consider it likely the US will use such systems to selectively disadvantage countries we may consider friendly or may not support military action against.
Not leaving control over such systems in the hand of another country - no matter how friendly - is prudent planning. You don't know if they'll still be as friendly 10-20 years down the line, or if you have different strategic objectives that may lead to dramatically different approaches to third parties.
Of course, if you do know all preceeding primes, then it's just a matter of restricting your test to just that sequence, as everything else by definition have smaller prime factors you'll test against.
If not there's a bit more work, but you can still save a lot over brute forcing it.
If you start at 2 and work your way upward, and for as long as you know the next prime up, you'd only need to test with the next prime.
After that, you can still discard tests with any numbers that can trivially easily be shown to have small prime factors without even trying a division, like all even numbers, all numbers ending in 5 etc.. There are quite a few rules that can be added to just immediately skip a lot of numbers as you're iterating upwards with quite cheap logic.
You can also test the number you will use to test your potential prime by first testing that against a set of small primes (apart from the ones you've already discounted by not generating the test numbers), to quickly discard those test numbers before you attempt a huge expensive division. It's also possible to derive relatively simple rules to check for divisibility of many small primes that may be far cheaper than trying an actual division once you start getting up to reasonably large numbers.
The method of discaring tests against numbers divisible by a set of small primes is known as the Sieve of Eratosthenes... I think there are a few alternative methods - the main benefit of the sieve of Eratosthenes is that the basic algorithm extremely simple and still a vast improvement over brute forcing.
Hitler very much used religion for his own ends, yes, which was exactly why I pointed to it. But he did so by coopting established christianity in Germany.
The policies Mao implemented and the decisions he took after the revolution, in order to try and implement his ideas, very much suffered from many of the same problems as Lenins - they both attempted to force through changes based on very flawed ideas of the consequences.
The end result is still the same - lots of people dead. A more nuanced view of Mao doesn't change that, and shouldn't be used to excuse his failures as a leader - only to explain the differences and contradictions between Mao as a leader and Mao as an ideologist.
It's mostly interesting for what it teaches about how far China today is from the original ideologies of the revolutionary movement. It's fairly bland - it consists entirely of quotes from Mao's books and speeches, most of them fairly vague, generic and for the most part not particularly controversial.
Unless you're living in a void and not critically evaluating what you read, Mao's little red IS harmless.
Mao certainly caused a lot of deaths, but contrary to leaders like Stalin, Mao was more a flawed leader that screwed up badly than someone whose core ideology involved mass murder, and if you read the little red book you will see that reflected in a lot of what he is saying.
Most people reading it will find themselves agreeing with a lot of it, either because it is vague enough so as to be more or less apolitical, or because it plain makes sense. Most of those same people will probably never like Mao, nor will they they ever become apologists for what he did. Even the Chinese Communist Party readily admits that Mao had many flaws and that many of his policies should never have been carried out because they were disasterous and caused vast numbers of deaths that could have been avoided with better leadership.
But you will also likely find that many of the things in Maos little red book are things you can agree with exactly because it contains admonishions of how to act that the Chinese Communist Party really ought to be learning from.
A few examples (NOTE: There are certainly far more controversial quotes too - particularly regarding the Leninist concept of democratic centralism - I'm not trying to whitewash Mao, just to show a side most peopke don't know - for the other side, read the book):
"A proper measure of democracy should be put into effect in the army, chiefly by abolishing the feudal practice of bullying and beating and by having officers and men share weal and woe.".
And: " With regard to economic democracy, the representatives elected by the soldiers must be ensured the right to assist (but not to bypass) the company leadership in managing the company's supplies and mess."
And: "We must not be complacent over any success. We should check our complacency and constantly criticize our shortcomings, just as we should wash our faces or sweep the floor every day to remove the dirt and keep them clean."
And: "We should be modest and prudent, guard against arrogance and rashness, and serve the Chinese people heart and soul. . . ."
And: " Our duty is to hold ourselves responsible to the people. Every word, every act and every policy must conform to the people's interests, and if mistakes occur, they must be corrected -- that is what being responsible to the people means."
The biggest "danger" the little red book constitutes is that it might make some readers see the difference between communist ideology and what has been practiced in the name of communism in totalitarian states - the greatest bulwark against support for communist ideas today is that most people still think of countries like China, North Korea or the old Soviet Union as representative of communist ideology, rather than as dictatures that flagrantly abuse it's symbolism and phrases. How many people today consider the Inquisition representative of Christian ideas (I don't, and I'm an atheist), or for that matter consider Hitlers support for the church as proof churches are evil?
However, the Chinese Communist Party is really the organisation that should worry most about people actually reading and understanding Mao and realising just exactly how far from the goals of the Chinese revolution they have moved.
They better hope the Chinese people don't start taking to heart quotes like the ones above, or the following one, and start expecting for them to be followed:
" Every comrade must be brought to understand that the supreme test of the words and deeds of a Communist is whether they conform with the highest interests and enjoy the support of the overwhelming majority of the people."
If you'd like to see for yourself what it actually says, all of Mao's little red book is available online
Re: 5, see HST 327, Topic: Ideologies of power.
(disclaimer: I work at Yahoo)
We experiment mainly in two ways: Where one preference means we come in contact with someone who doesn't share our preferences in another area - for instance meeting friends who share an interest in programming but eat different food than me might get me to try eating something new -, and general curiosity; wondering if there isn't "something else" out there.
I share some of your worries. I am sure some people will self-reinforce many traits much more than today. And I am concerned that society will become much more resistant to change, and much more polarised, if everyone gets their own version of "truth" and can limit their exposure to other thinking much more efficiently.
On the other hand, I try to be hopeful that most people will still be curious, and will still rely on where some of their interests intersect with someone otherwise very different to try new things.
At least with Britannica you are assured that the information is gathered by people who get paid to do this as a job and the information is validated by fact checkers
And this experiment demonstrated that despite that their error rate wasn't much better than Wikipedia for the science subjects chosen. So what is your point?
You're assuming they'll vent the steam, which wouldn't make sense - you'd have to get people to fill water all the time - it would make more sense to feed it through a condenser and back into the engine. Using condensers for steam engines have a long history, and works well.
The problem is twofold: Lack of infrastructure, and (more importantly) lack of skilled labor. Manufacturing jobs are already outsourced to cheaper locations than India exactly because there's no problem finding people that can do the jobs.
Engineering jobs and other higher level jobs, however, isn't something that just requires language skills. I'm by no means hinting that Indians can't do them well - obviously they can, and many of them do, and more will, but training sufficient numbers to fuel that kind of growth fast enough to contain salary levels doesn't work (if it did, then salary levels in Bangalore wouldn't have been rising as quickly as they have, which is why I mentioned it in the first place)
To add to that: if the salaries don't continue to rise, it will be extremely hard to draw sufficient number of candidates.
Sure, outsourcing will spread - major companies are already looking to Russia and China, despite the language difficulties. But the reason they are doing so is because they aren't getting the savings they used to in India (in Bangalore or elsewhere) which was seen as a low hanging fruit.
No doubt India will continue to get jobs that require high skill levels, but demand is exceeding supply and so the balance gets redressed by rising salaries. That won't change until either the supply dramatically increases - which is a process that takes decades, not years, or until salaries are high enough to remove a lot of the economic incentive for moving more jobs.
You also completely missed my point about software exports. India has a large number of companies that operate offshore engineering centers for companies that don't want the hassle of operating offshore departments themselves.
Many of these companies will want to find more than one leg to stand on. Even more so as salaries rise enough to make their offshoring ventures less profitable.
Many of them will find using dead time or unallocated engineers on creating products a viable supplementary revenue source.
Many people who are gaining experience working in these companies will eventually start their own companies, and at least some of them will want to develop their own products rather than working on other peoples products.
Some of these companies are bound to eventually get succesfull at exporting software from India, and that I was pointing out.
Ultimately much of this will translate into job creation also in the US and Europe as these companies face customer demands for on site training and support and face to face access to customer facing engineering personell.
Even majorer off-shorers like Wipro boast of their customer proximity - gained by having thousands of engineers on payroll in Europe, USA and Japan to support their off-shoring business, which is a pretty good indication that we'll start seeing the same from Indian startups hoping to make it big.
The commission (the executive branch of the EU government) which is generally the organ proposing laws is appointed by the heads of state of the member states of the EU - one appointee each, but must be approved by parliament (if parliament refuses approval, the heads of state will generally have to propose replacements, which has happened a few times - I don't know what would happen in the case of a stand off between the two).
The council of ministers consists of the ministers of the member states, and generally sits in groups of their respective areas (like when the agriculture ministers were used to try to push the patent directive through the council)
The council generally has the most power in terms of making law. The commission second, as they prepare the initial proposal. The parliament is a weak third.
The reason for that is that the council represents the governments of the member states, that still formally are sovereign nations. The council acts with the authority of those governments.
Thus the position of the parliament is comparable to the position of Congress in the US under the Articles of Confederation (note to those not familiar with US history: this has nothing to do with the Confederacy of the southern states around the civil war), before the constitution was enacted and the US became a federal republic. You also have the same pressures towards creating a more cohesive central government with actual power to enforce decisions as what lead to the US constitution.
(Of course it's highly contentious amongst people in the EU whether the EU should become a state or not - considering the ridiculous over-engineering of the proposed constitution i think we can be very happy it's moving slowly)
Yeah, all of a few dimes worth of hard disk space at todays prices.
That's the main reason I use Gnome. I am comfortable with the default Fedora packaged RPM's with practically no customisation. I set a desktop background, turn off the menu bar in gnome-terminal, and change the default font size, and that's about it.
With KDE I immediately get an urge to start changing every damn setting to try to coerce it to act the way I want it.
I realise this is a matter of personal taste, but to me it boils down to: What are the relative ratios of KDE and Gnome users that happily do less than 5 minutes of customisation of the desktop before they feel settled in on a new machine?
That would really make an interesting study.
Linus leads because his decisions regarding the kernel are pragmatic enough to work, nothing else. That accomplishment means we'll listen to what we have to say, but it certainly doesn't mean people will automatically agree with him, as countless flamewars on the kernel list can attest to.
If he thinks Gnome is crap, then fine, it's his choice. Personally I think KDE is crap, and simply won't consider using it because it feels like a less polished version of Windows (and using Windows makes me feel crippled and ready to cry). I don't mean this as flamebait - I'm know many KDE users feel the same about Gnome, and that's their right. In either case it's mostly subjective ideas about how a UI should work on both sides.
I'm sure there are objectively measurable differences in quality too, if you look closely enough, but I simply don't care - the subjective differences in usability for me far outweigh anything else.
For me, it's more important that the Gnome and KDE teams work together on ensuring interoperability than ending up with a single desktop (and they have done that a lot of the time, with the freedesktop.org specs. implemented by both for instance).
Engineers in Bangalore for instance have seen their salaries skyrocket over the last 5 years, and as a result they are becoming less competitive and companies are increasingly looking at other parts of India to outsource to, and to cheaper countries.
But it has also meant that many companies that might have considered offshoring at the prices 5 years ago don't see that high an incentive any more.
Eventually there will be an equilibrium. These kinds of positions simply aren't comparable to minimum wage manufacturing jobs that require little to no training and can be done by anyone, and so they contribute to massively drive up salary levels in the areas companies outsource to.
The trickle down effects may even get sufficient to start driving up overall prices in these countries - it certainly has driven up prices for housing for instance in many outsourcing hotspots.
The net result is that while I can understand that some people are concerned for their jobs, this won't cause an implosion of the job market for engineers in industrialised countries - for that the cost of engineers in the main outsourcing locations is rising too fast, and most alternatives have "problems" such as lack of people with sufficient skills in English.
Ultimately, for the right people this is also an opportunity: While the Indian software industry is still mostly offshoring based, for instance, the growing IT sector in India also means the opportunities for Indian based software houses are increasing. Ultimately we'll be seeing increasing amounts software exports from companies that will need people to work on site with customers in the west - there's always work that can't be done remotely.
There were about 120 million households in the US in 2000 according to the UN Human Settlements Program. That still means about 13%, though.