This whole approach to me reeks to substance dualism; the human brain is a computer, a very advanced one at that, but it's just a computer. there is no 'soul' that somehow makes the human brain the only thing that's capable of intelligent operations.
Why run Windows in the first place? I am an Agile transformation coach, and I work in large organizations, and I always wonder, Why, if they are deploying on RHEL, are their developers writing code on Windows laptops?
I have no admiration for M$ and I have used Linux in some form or other for more than fifteen years. I admit Windows 7 is a decent OS, may be the best after Win 2000.
Linux is still not a viable substitute to Windows when it comes to Desktop. I don't know how good/bad the IDEs used for enterprise SW development are on Linux. Coding is not the *only* activity a developer does and as an Agile coach you would know the *endless stream of meetings*...do we have a substitute for MS Outlook? IMHO Agile ideas may make a stronger case for M$ SW.
India - the worlds second largest market for more or less everything - is Android territory when it comes to mobile devices. Indians generally ask one question while purchasing a cell phone...does it run WhatsApp? Most will not use an email program in their lives, business is conducted on WhatsApp.
So, Facebook (WhatsApp) and Google (Android) has the country divided equally among themselves.
There is no Apple ecosystem in India. All the "iDevices" are niche products used by the minority upper class/upper middle class. Step into a crowded first class compartment of a Mumbai suburban train and you will spot countless Samsung Galaxy phones, a smattering of Huawei, Micromaxx, Xiaomi, ZTE, MotoG etc and may be one or two iPhone's. Its not going to change unless Apple competes on price.
Cashless transactions in India became widespread when a rice distribution scheme was replaced by direct payments to debit cards issued to the poor. Under the old system, about 80% of the rice was stolen before it reached the final recipients. Compared to that, 2% is nothing.
What utter nonsense!!! I am from India, and I follow what's happening in the country.
You are talking about PDS - Public Distribution System, a version of the food stamp program in US. Yes, there are inadequacies and some level of pilferage, but not like what you describe. PDS is not only rice, its wheat, sugar, pulses, and kerosene.
Less than 60% of the populace of the country has a bank account, that too most of the accounts are dormant. Forget about credit/debit cards.
The current demonetization is the stupidest idea any Indian government has done in the last fifty years. First they claimed it was to uncover black money, then it was "terrorists", and now "digital India".
You are either trolling or talking out of your backside.
A few days back I was driving from Baltimore to the border of New Jersey and New York...a lot of Pennsylvania with Trump and Gary Johnson signs to cross.
On way back I stopped for gas. It was a rural Pennsylvania gas station on US-30. The only purchase I did the whole day was a pint of chocolate milk from the gas station. A brand I had not heard before, local to Pennsylvania. I paid cash $1.13.
Today I am seeing a "suggested post" on Facebook - organic milk of the same brand!
I don't use Facebook on phone. My phone has no data plan.
But Facebook found out I bought chocolate milk!
They know a purchase of chocolate milk from the gas station as the cashier had to scan the item. From the cellphone tower records (a T-Mobile prepaid connection) they narrowed down the choice. I was in the area when the purchase was made.
T-Mobile would have saved the pre-paid account activation IP, which Facebook knows too which I use to browse. They know the SIM was at the gas station.
The moral of the story...they are going to track and infiltrate whether you use cash or coins!
Its difficult to make a profit from Twitter which will keep bean counters contend.
Twitter should have positioned themselves as Craigslist. Then they would have been a valuable service and might have lasted. For that to happen the people behind Twitter should be less greedy.
Hindus come out on top, as they have for some time now: evidence that the more gods you believe in, the more successful you are in life.
A majority of Hindus in US will the upper caste (start from Brahmins) upper class who had the advantages of traveling to US for study (or work) and settled down. They are generically called "caste Hindus", they would be materially wealthy whether in US or India.
The right wing Hindu movement (not all of them are bat-shit evil, though quite ignorant) has a lot of support from US, so when the Indian PM Modi shows up at Madison Square Garden, he gets a full house. http://time.com/3442490/india-narendra-modi-madison-square-garden/
In India, they assert their power forcing down vegetarianism (this is a complex issue, which can be argued on moral, ethical and functional terms, here is a primer http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/on-diet-in-india-and-western-arguments-against/article7440854.ece, the usual fear of minorities, which includes Christians, lower caste Hindu's themselves, and other standard issue conservative and regressive ideals.
In USA, they will be seen as archaic with the next generation and the current Millenials, who had the fortune to study in secular American schools which promote some version of tolerance and humanism, which is closer to the core tenets of Hinduism in its truest essence...Tat Tvam Asi.
I am an Indian. I have no idea what you are talking about.
You can get a degree in India in one year, and if your parents are well connected you don't have to attend classes - just the threat of losing your job is enough to make teachers give us pass.
Do you think the above is a common occurrence in India (or anywhere else in the world) or some one off event?
The rest of your assertions is also utter nonsense. Are you Donald Trump by any chance?
What the university did is stupid! But your hypothesis is worse than stupid, its bordering on xenophobic fear mongering.
They gave way too much power to developers, so now Android may be an extremely flexible and powerful mobile OS, but it also requires every user to act as a sysadmin, constantly monitoring resources, manually killing apps, etc etc. Battery life is abysmal, and malware is ripe in the android ecosystem. And that's on top of the myriad landfill android devices which are so breathtakingly shotty that they arn't even fit for purposes as simple as a basic e-reader.
An open OS / image will be used by people/organizations to their liking or preferences. This will include everything you mentioned, including the fact that the low entry barriers make the ecosystem affordable to all and sundry.
When I am in Mumbai, the guy who owns vegetable shop uses a slightly advanced Samsung Note, and the youngsters manning the counters use a cheap entry level Android. Both play videos, and allows most common apps. In other words, they are using the same software, and that's what matters. This is a revolution of unimaginable magnitude. The entry levels Androids - the $30 to $50 versions - are the first communication device for most of its customers.
The attitude Google showed towards Android is the reason smartphones became a commodity, as ubiquitous as the older feature-phone Nokia's. This is by large a positive development for society.
I've seen no evidence to support that thesis. Do you have information not available to the rest of us?
Half of the success is showing up, and she seems to be very good in that. She's talented to put up a show, may be like The Donald. There is no evidence of any particular skill other than the aura she projected which apparently fooled even people like you.
There is not a single good decision I can think of she took when she was at Yahoo. What Yahoo needed was surgery and re-invention, a surgery which might have even killed the company. Instead what she gave was band-aid and placebo.
Yahoo also acknowledged that Tumblr â" its biggest acquisition under its current chief executive, Marissa Mayer â" was now worth only one-third of the $1.1 billion that Yahoo paid for it in 2013.
30% of $1 billion is $300 million! Tumblr is worth $300 million!! Indeed a revelation!!!
Ms Mayer made a miscalculation. If she was patient and not going into Yahoo, she had a chance to become the first woman CEO of Microsoft. Her competition Nadella is the poster child of mediocrity and she would have wiped the floor during CEO search.
Imagine the damage and the headlines she would have created if she played with M$. Yahoo is too small for someone of her talent.
If a developer is not capable, its for the organization to do something about it. If the organization/enterprise prefers a developer because he/she charges less though he/she is incompetent, then blame the organization, not the worker.
Also, most of the enterprise software work - for that matter most of web application development, including Android - needs someone who can understand the process and connect the dots. Genuinely good and imaginative programmers will be bored out of their wits in no time.
Do you want to live a life of fun, good food, fun entertainment and hot beverages, then die at 70, or do you want to live a life of measuring everything daily in a state of panic that you might get cancer and then die at 74 - that is, if you don't accidentally walk in front of a bus when you're 40?
Do the fun, good food, entertainment, hot/cold beverages and all that stuff you may die at 70. Agreed.
But how will you die? You will probably die of some medical complication attributed to your lifestyle choices which makes such a hit on your quality of life that death is probably a better option.
The problem is the price...$26 billion all cash deal!!!
If i were dabbling in stocks i would short MSFT immediately. This is stupider than their NOKIA acquisition. Most of these companies are run by mediocre people with no imagination and too much money.
Maybe the Free Interweb idea had its merits, but FB and their advertisement / PR goons went about publicizing the worst way possible...the ads showed poor people beaming with joy as if internet access is going to eradicate hunger, poverty and other social ills. This was the 21st century version of "fairness cream" advertisement.
What FB should have was test the service in selected areas, or may be one or two circles before planning a pan-Indian roll out.
Also, I doubt if the feature phones used by a majority of poor / lower income strata citizens (including some of the tech agnostic well off crowd) will have any meaningful browsing experience.
Hossein Derakhshan's became a political prisoner for voicing his opinion.
Countries like China, Saudi and Iran leads when it comes to imprisoning you for voicing an anti-establishment opinion, or highlighting their idiocies. In India you will be trolled, and sometimes authorities (or their tools) may take you to court. I guess its a mix of everything if you are in Russia...including executions.
That said, I don't think his complaint is very valid. Let me quote him...
Blogs were gold and bloggers were rock stars back in 2008 when I was arrested. At that point, and despite the fact the state was blocking access to my blog from inside Iran, I had an audience of around 20,000 people every day. People used to carefully read my posts and leave lots of relevant comments, even those who hated my guts. I could empower or embarrass anyone I wanted. I felt like a monarch.
He is upset he is not getting 20000 people every day. The original audience he will have to rebuild and it will take time (whether on Facebook / blog.) Once he does that and if his audience finds him relevant - this is the tricky part - the quality and quantity of comments will increase.
Will he be censored on Facebook? The answer lies in the arrangement Facebook has with Iranian "Ministry of Truth and Harmony".
Last week I was at a post production studio in Mumbai. The editor was working on an Indian Hindi TV series - MAIN KUCH BHI KAR SAKTHI HOON (I Can Do Anything.) https://www.youtube.com/user/mkbksh
The show is set in rural India, follows the usual Hindi or Indian cinema/television melodramatic hyperventilating style. Here is the beef...rather than inane plots on good versus evil, bad mother in laws and familiar Indian TV soap tropes, this show had female protagonists who were bucking the system and bringing out change in the society.
The familiar style they used made sure a majority of the audience will feel comfortable.
Gates Foundation was one of the Producers. This is thinking out of the box...you need a bit of 'good old propaganda' to support you when you go to rural communities to change their perception on unhealthy practices.
GMAIL / EMAIL (except in business environment) is more or less on the way of dodo. I am looking at my INBOX and most emails are from service providers like banks, utilities etc. not friends / family which has migrated to some sort of social media / messaging platform.
Facebook made the right call in buying Whatsapp. For all its smarts, self driving cars, robots, AI and what not Zuckerberg has an edge over Brin and his cohorts when it comes to interpersonal communication between human beings.
I am not willing to pay $10 p.m. for every single one of these; especially to only read any article very occasionally or only once
You hit the nail on the head.
The biggest success in the world of software and entertainment as far as adoption go is Popcorn Time. If there is a subscription model attached most of the viewers will be OK to pay a few dollars a month for unfettered access. (To an extent this is what Netflix is providing.)
Popcorn Time is not possible with online versions of print media. The closest you get is Google News - except for a few websites the links do not need a subscription. But then you will quickly go over the limit of free articles with no option but to pay full price / subscribe.
Even "Google Contribute" is not addressing this issue...its only to show less advertisement.
I have lived and worked in both US and India - and a few others. I have used public transportation extensively in both these places as I dislike daily driving.
I made a comparison about an India and US in 2015. I would not make such a comparison in 1985. I specifically said "poor is better represented in the Indian political process as they are a bigger voting block."
Your perceptions of India and rest of the world may be coming from a limited world view. There is a phrase in Sanskrit - KOOP MANDOOK.
US is worse than many developing nations when it comes to public transportation.
There is no way most people can depend on public transportation in US for regular commute. The frequency, and reach of buses/trains are incredibly poor in most of US. The exceptions are the few big cities - NYC, Chicago, Portland etc., that too if you live in an area close to a station.
Not even Bay Area - a high populated urban area - you can depend on public transportation for daily commute unless you have an option for point to point travel on BART / bus. Try going from Hayward to San Mateo - 25 minutes if you drive, more than an hour if you take a bus. You only have to cross a bridge!!!
The same with many East coast neighborhoods - try Phoenixville PA to Philadelphia on a SEPTA bus.
It sucks to be poor. But in 2015, its better to be poor in a country like India compared to US as poor as a voting block is better represented and their needs better taken care of...and that includes public transportation.
To get a better perspective on what it means to be poor in United States this book is a good beginning - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_and_Dimed
Slashdot Mirror
This whole approach to me reeks to substance dualism; the human brain is a computer, a very advanced one at that, but it's just a computer. there is no 'soul' that somehow makes the human brain the only thing that's capable of intelligent operations.
Start here...https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer
Why run Windows in the first place? I am an Agile transformation coach, and I work in large organizations, and I always wonder, Why, if they are deploying on RHEL, are their developers writing code on Windows laptops?
I have no admiration for M$ and I have used Linux in some form or other for more than fifteen years. I admit Windows 7 is a decent OS, may be the best after Win 2000.
Linux is still not a viable substitute to Windows when it comes to Desktop. I don't know how good/bad the IDEs used for enterprise SW development are on Linux. Coding is not the *only* activity a developer does and as an Agile coach you would know the *endless stream of meetings*...do we have a substitute for MS Outlook? IMHO Agile ideas may make a stronger case for M$ SW.
India - the worlds second largest market for more or less everything - is Android territory when it comes to mobile devices. Indians generally ask one question while purchasing a cell phone...does it run WhatsApp? Most will not use an email program in their lives, business is conducted on WhatsApp.
So, Facebook (WhatsApp) and Google (Android) has the country divided equally among themselves.
There is no Apple ecosystem in India. All the "iDevices" are niche products used by the minority upper class/upper middle class. Step into a crowded first class compartment of a Mumbai suburban train and you will spot countless Samsung Galaxy phones, a smattering of Huawei, Micromaxx, Xiaomi, ZTE, MotoG etc and may be one or two iPhone's. Its not going to change unless Apple competes on price.
Cashless transactions in India became widespread when a rice distribution scheme was replaced by direct payments to debit cards issued to the poor. Under the old system, about 80% of the rice was stolen before it reached the final recipients. Compared to that, 2% is nothing.
What utter nonsense!!! I am from India, and I follow what's happening in the country.
You are talking about PDS - Public Distribution System, a version of the food stamp program in US. Yes, there are inadequacies and some level of pilferage, but not like what you describe. PDS is not only rice, its wheat, sugar, pulses, and kerosene.
Less than 60% of the populace of the country has a bank account, that too most of the accounts are dormant. Forget about credit/debit cards.
The current demonetization is the stupidest idea any Indian government has done in the last fifty years. First they claimed it was to uncover black money, then it was "terrorists", and now "digital India".
You are either trolling or talking out of your backside.
A few days back I was driving from Baltimore to the border of New Jersey and New York...a lot of Pennsylvania with Trump and Gary Johnson signs to cross.
On way back I stopped for gas. It was a rural Pennsylvania gas station on US-30. The only purchase I did the whole day was a pint of chocolate milk from the gas station. A brand I had not heard before, local to Pennsylvania. I paid cash $1.13.
Today I am seeing a "suggested post" on Facebook - organic milk of the same brand!
I don't use Facebook on phone. My phone has no data plan.
But Facebook found out I bought chocolate milk!
They know a purchase of chocolate milk from the gas station as the cashier had to scan the item. From the cellphone tower records (a T-Mobile prepaid connection) they narrowed down the choice. I was in the area when the purchase was made.
T-Mobile would have saved the pre-paid account activation IP, which Facebook knows too which I use to browse. They know the SIM was at the gas station.
The moral of the story...they are going to track and infiltrate whether you use cash or coins!
Its difficult to make a profit from Twitter which will keep bean counters contend.
Twitter should have positioned themselves as Craigslist. Then they would have been a valuable service and might have lasted. For that to happen the people behind Twitter should be less greedy.
Hindus come out on top, as they have for some time now: evidence that the more gods you believe in, the more successful you are in life.
A majority of Hindus in US will the upper caste (start from Brahmins) upper class who had the advantages of traveling to US for study (or work) and settled down. They are generically called "caste Hindus", they would be materially wealthy whether in US or India.
The right wing Hindu movement (not all of them are bat-shit evil, though quite ignorant) has a lot of support from US, so when the Indian PM Modi shows up at Madison Square Garden, he gets a full house. http://time.com/3442490/india-narendra-modi-madison-square-garden/
In India, they assert their power forcing down vegetarianism (this is a complex issue, which can be argued on moral, ethical and functional terms, here is a primer http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/on-diet-in-india-and-western-arguments-against/article7440854.ece, the usual fear of minorities, which includes Christians, lower caste Hindu's themselves, and other standard issue conservative and regressive ideals.
In USA, they will be seen as archaic with the next generation and the current Millenials, who had the fortune to study in secular American schools which promote some version of tolerance and humanism, which is closer to the core tenets of Hinduism in its truest essence...Tat Tvam Asi.
I am an Indian. I have no idea what you are talking about.
You can get a degree in India in one year, and if your parents are well connected you don't have to attend classes - just the threat of losing your job is enough to make teachers give us pass.
Do you think the above is a common occurrence in India (or anywhere else in the world) or some one off event?
The rest of your assertions is also utter nonsense. Are you Donald Trump by any chance?
What the university did is stupid! But your hypothesis is worse than stupid, its bordering on xenophobic fear mongering.
Alrighty then...angry birds dude reviving Nokia is like Donald Trump making America great again.
They gave way too much power to developers, so now Android may be an extremely flexible and powerful mobile OS, but it also requires every user to act as a sysadmin, constantly monitoring resources, manually killing apps, etc etc. Battery life is abysmal, and malware is ripe in the android ecosystem. And that's on top of the myriad landfill android devices which are so breathtakingly shotty that they arn't even fit for purposes as simple as a basic e-reader.
An open OS / image will be used by people/organizations to their liking or preferences. This will include everything you mentioned, including the fact that the low entry barriers make the ecosystem affordable to all and sundry.
When I am in Mumbai, the guy who owns vegetable shop uses a slightly advanced Samsung Note, and the youngsters manning the counters use a cheap entry level Android. Both play videos, and allows most common apps. In other words, they are using the same software, and that's what matters. This is a revolution of unimaginable magnitude. The entry levels Androids - the $30 to $50 versions - are the first communication device for most of its customers.
The attitude Google showed towards Android is the reason smartphones became a commodity, as ubiquitous as the older feature-phone Nokia's. This is by large a positive development for society.
I've seen no evidence to support that thesis. Do you have information not available to the rest of us?
Half of the success is showing up, and she seems to be very good in that. She's talented to put up a show, may be like The Donald. There is no evidence of any particular skill other than the aura she projected which apparently fooled even people like you.
There is not a single good decision I can think of she took when she was at Yahoo. What Yahoo needed was surgery and re-invention, a surgery which might have even killed the company. Instead what she gave was band-aid and placebo.
Yahoo also acknowledged that Tumblr â" its biggest acquisition under its current chief executive, Marissa Mayer â" was now worth only one-third of the $1.1 billion that Yahoo paid for it in 2013.
30% of $1 billion is $300 million! Tumblr is worth $300 million!! Indeed a revelation!!!
Ms Mayer made a miscalculation. If she was patient and not going into Yahoo, she had a chance to become the first woman CEO of Microsoft. Her competition Nadella is the poster child of mediocrity and she would have wiped the floor during CEO search.
Imagine the damage and the headlines she would have created if she played with M$. Yahoo is too small for someone of her talent.
I feel Occulus Rift - and VR in general - is today's Segway. Loads of hype.
I am your Indian software developer.
If a developer is not capable, its for the organization to do something about it. If the organization/enterprise prefers a developer because he/she charges less though he/she is incompetent, then blame the organization, not the worker.
Also, most of the enterprise software work - for that matter most of web application development, including Android - needs someone who can understand the process and connect the dots. Genuinely good and imaginative programmers will be bored out of their wits in no time.
It seems you are mediocre yourself.
Do you want to live a life of fun, good food, fun entertainment and hot beverages, then die at 70, or do you want to live a life of measuring everything daily in a state of panic that you might get cancer and then die at 74 - that is, if you don't accidentally walk in front of a bus when you're 40?
Do the fun, good food, entertainment, hot/cold beverages and all that stuff you may die at 70. Agreed.
But how will you die? You will probably die of some medical complication attributed to your lifestyle choices which makes such a hit on your quality of life that death is probably a better option.
The problem is the price...$26 billion all cash deal!!!
If i were dabbling in stocks i would short MSFT immediately. This is stupider than their NOKIA acquisition. Most of these companies are run by mediocre people with no imagination and too much money.
Maybe the Free Interweb idea had its merits, but FB and their advertisement / PR goons went about publicizing the worst way possible...the ads showed poor people beaming with joy as if internet access is going to eradicate hunger, poverty and other social ills. This was the 21st century version of "fairness cream" advertisement.
What FB should have was test the service in selected areas, or may be one or two circles before planning a pan-Indian roll out.
Also, I doubt if the feature phones used by a majority of poor / lower income strata citizens (including some of the tech agnostic well off crowd) will have any meaningful browsing experience.
Countries like China, Saudi and Iran leads when it comes to imprisoning you for voicing an anti-establishment opinion, or highlighting their idiocies. In India you will be trolled, and sometimes authorities (or their tools) may take you to court. I guess its a mix of everything if you are in Russia...including executions.
That said, I don't think his complaint is very valid. Let me quote him...
Blogs were gold and bloggers were rock stars back in 2008 when I was arrested. At that point, and despite the fact the state was blocking access to my blog from inside Iran, I had an audience of around 20,000 people every day. People used to carefully read my posts and leave lots of relevant comments, even those who hated my guts. I could empower or embarrass anyone I wanted. I felt like a monarch.
He is upset he is not getting 20000 people every day. The original audience he will have to rebuild and it will take time (whether on Facebook / blog.) Once he does that and if his audience finds him relevant - this is the tricky part - the quality and quantity of comments will increase.
Will he be censored on Facebook? The answer lies in the arrangement Facebook has with Iranian "Ministry of Truth and Harmony".
Last week I was at a post production studio in Mumbai. The editor was working on an Indian Hindi TV series - MAIN KUCH BHI KAR SAKTHI HOON (I Can Do Anything.) https://www.youtube.com/user/mkbksh
The show is set in rural India, follows the usual Hindi or Indian cinema/television melodramatic hyperventilating style. Here is the beef...rather than inane plots on good versus evil, bad mother in laws and familiar Indian TV soap tropes, this show had female protagonists who were bucking the system and bringing out change in the society.
The familiar style they used made sure a majority of the audience will feel comfortable.
Gates Foundation was one of the Producers. This is thinking out of the box...you need a bit of 'good old propaganda' to support you when you go to rural communities to change their perception on unhealthy practices.
GMAIL / EMAIL (except in business environment) is more or less on the way of dodo. I am looking at my INBOX and most emails are from service providers like banks, utilities etc. not friends / family which has migrated to some sort of social media / messaging platform.
Facebook made the right call in buying Whatsapp. For all its smarts, self driving cars, robots, AI and what not Zuckerberg has an edge over Brin and his cohorts when it comes to interpersonal communication between human beings.
Why Google did not buy Sun?
I am not willing to pay $10 p.m. for every single one of these; especially to only read any article very occasionally or only once
You hit the nail on the head.
The biggest success in the world of software and entertainment as far as adoption go is Popcorn Time. If there is a subscription model attached most of the viewers will be OK to pay a few dollars a month for unfettered access. (To an extent this is what Netflix is providing.)
Popcorn Time is not possible with online versions of print media. The closest you get is Google News - except for a few websites the links do not need a subscription. But then you will quickly go over the limit of free articles with no option but to pay full price / subscribe.
Even "Google Contribute" is not addressing this issue...its only to show less advertisement.
The latest hypothesis is that beta-amyloid (and the plaques) is a result of Alzheimer's, rather than a cause.
http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-04-30/do-we-all-have-alzhemers-completely-wrong-man-says-yes/
I have lived and worked in both US and India - and a few others. I have used public transportation extensively in both these places as I dislike daily driving.
I made a comparison about an India and US in 2015. I would not make such a comparison in 1985. I specifically said "poor is better represented in the Indian political process as they are a bigger voting block."
Your perceptions of India and rest of the world may be coming from a limited world view. There is a phrase in Sanskrit - KOOP MANDOOK.
US is worse than many developing nations when it comes to public transportation.
There is no way most people can depend on public transportation in US for regular commute. The frequency, and reach of buses/trains are incredibly poor in most of US. The exceptions are the few big cities - NYC, Chicago, Portland etc., that too if you live in an area close to a station.
Not even Bay Area - a high populated urban area - you can depend on public transportation for daily commute unless you have an option for point to point travel on BART / bus. Try going from Hayward to San Mateo - 25 minutes if you drive, more than an hour if you take a bus. You only have to cross a bridge!!!
The same with many East coast neighborhoods - try Phoenixville PA to Philadelphia on a SEPTA bus.
It sucks to be poor. But in 2015, its better to be poor in a country like India compared to US as poor as a voting block is better represented and their needs better taken care of...and that includes public transportation.
To get a better perspective on what it means to be poor in United States this book is a good beginning - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_and_Dimed