Having been on a few DXpeditions myself (to places you can take airplanes too) I need to comment that where these guys are planning on going I imagine there isn't going to be Pizza, running water, or maybe even standing buildings!
Think tents, some generators, and antennas on at a barren location.
What I WOULD suggest to the parties involved is to look into tieing into some naturalist activities. This way you can have a double edged story AND increase your possible audience at the same time.
There was exactly just such a production a few years ago, I believe the expedition went to Hurd Island (maybe some other place in Antartica...) They had a group of naturalists, mountain climbers and amateur radio folks that were each there for their own reasons. Made a pretty reasonable show - and was aired on PBS originally.
Do something along these lines and you might find sponsorship from National Geographic?!?
I tend to agree with abolith's assessment. Further, the moderation system is truly BROKEN when someone who expresses a reasonable opinion without either slander or malice and directly on topic is moderated DOWN.
Back to the point at hand - the cop has probable cause to stop and question them because of the report. Further, he says he is involved in an investigation which is basically saying "I've got probable cause to be talking to you, i.e. not a random molestation of a private citizen.
Next consider this from the officer's point of view (really -try placing yourself in his position for a minute.) He's come upon a guy who is acting hinky. You want to know who you are dealing with for your own safety! You're going to take the guys ID and find out if he's dangerous to you, wanted for some reason, etc. Again - the officer already has stepped over the first hurdle of probable cause because he's responding to a call, and this fellow meets the general description of what he's looking for. For that matter - the guy IS who the officer is looking for! The report may have been inaccurate as to what was really transpiring, but a concerned citizen was doing what we would all hope they would do if we were suffering from spousal abuse, or some other such.
I've been the manager that had an employee commit sexual harassment of several women in our very small office. He was flagrant about it. I had information from multiple women that he was doing it. (What's worse is the idiot had a wife 7 months pregnant!) He wasn't fired, but was put on notice that it had to stop immediately. That nonsense ended, but he had plenty of OTHER issues that made him a real problem.
When he chose to go to another job, we all wished him well (and were secretly thinking THANK GOD he's going).
I'm not sure I'm willing to accept this claim at face value because it's a bit contrary to some simple facts. What I was taught back in elementary school (CA in the 60's) was that the California central valley was the best farm land in the country because it is essentially a vast flood plain like the Nile. (Then we have the entire Mississippi flood plain to talk about as well.)
Sacramento is not THAT big when compared to the rest of the valley, and the population density in the valley is quite low.
The vast majority of California's population is actually in desert areas (LA and San Diego) that can only exist there because of imported water. This isn't prime agricultural land without the water which "man" would have to bring there anyway -
So I just don't believe the conclusions being reached here concerning the magnitude of the loss.
IF the facilities are owned by the company, then you have no privacy. It's as simple as that. Haven't you guys heard of all the neat spyware some employers use to watch the activities of employees? That's all legal in a work setting.
The thing that puts this into a gray zone in my mind is that the company doesn't own the hardware. They own the email address itself to the extent that you own mycompany.com. Yet if this provider is doing this without compensation I would imagine that the hard line I mentioned in the previous paragraph gets gray. IANAL - but that is my understanding of what is allowed.
Well - you can come mighty close to this - and you miss some significant details. If it takes your company 5 engineers to do the job, and Indian based solution can apply 15-25 engineers for a lower cost! Then there is the work ethic these people have -it's significant! I'm not bashing the American work ethic - just commenting that the Indian work ethic is also substantial.
Oh - did I mention that I'm running an India based project? It seems to be going quite well. The real issues are a matter of finding experienced people in India that can manage the local talent. Then there are issues with in-experienced teams needing everything explicitly stated for them. 5 years from now this won't likely be a problem.
So - be afraid. Be very afraid. This trend isn't going to reverse itself.
There one problem with your thesis - the concept of there are only so many good engineers being a big one. When you are talking about TWO separate countries (read both India and China) that have 1 billion people each - and they graduate a huge number of bright people in engineering/CS every year (not to mention those that get educated here..) the supply of engineering talent is vast. The number of jobs is finite for a given economic situation.
Add this to the cost of doing business here in the states, and the salary of US resources and off you go to India/China.
Right now the number of EXPERIENCED engineers in these countries is low -but when you consider the multi-nationals like Intel/IBM/Cisco going there and hiring 3K-5K each - give it 5 years and the experience issue disappears too.
This guy brings up a REALLY GOOD STRATEGY that happens to fall into some advice my Grand Dad gave me years ago. Don't rely on just one career avenue , try to have at least TWO things you are good at. If one area falls away, take up the other career to get you by.
My Grand Dad lived this philosophy. He was a police officer for 25 years. He retired from the force and became a general contractor building houses. His son-in-law (my Dad) picked this up from him. My Dad had at least three careers. He did Electrical Engineering, he did general contracting, and did Real Estate Appraisal.
It's a GOOD idea.
I thought I had it covered - after all I'm can program. I thought that CS was my alternate career. Well - maybe this advice should be modified to TWO UNRELATED Career paths.
I work for a consulting company that has half their staff in India, i.e. we actively outsource EE work there. Becoming an EE isn't going to protect you from this trend. Doing ANYTHING in high-tech is probably open to being sent over-seas at some level.
The only reason I still have a position (I live in Sillycon Valley) is because I DO have 25 years of experience. I do architecture work, project lead work, etc. I have LOTS of friends who are out of work, and have been for a year or better.
I can safely say that I would recommend someone going for a degree OTHER than EE or CS for the time being. What EVER you do - the fact that you've got some practical experience is going to help you...but the life-long career in EE or CS is really a harder choice than it was when I got into it.
Hmm - if the guy can't get an ISDN line - he likely can't get a T1 either. ISDN can be repeated so he REALLY must be living in the boonies, or the world's oldest Central office that doesn't support ISDN (or morse code;-)
Whether you come at this from the left or the right - this court continually comes up with rulings that are on the margin. Hmmm - the Pledge of Allegiance is perhaps the best example. The court is out-of-step with the American Public - they have a HUGE tendancy to legislate from the bench which simply isn't their role.
I was speaking to a friend at lunch a week ago and this very subject came up.
My buddy is teaching a business class at a popular MBA night school. He told us the story of catching a person who had committed plagarism by using such a service. When the student was approached - "Oh I'm sorry, I didn't know - I won't do that again."
He got a 0 for the assignment and the incident was reported to the university.
So in this particular case, the prof was detecting the issue himself by merely looking at the available papers in the free section at a few popular sites.
I guess you might draw the conclusion that plagarists aren't necessarily very clever either.
I'll just point out that this decision was from the 9th Circuit, i.e. The "Silly" Circuit. This group of judges gets overturned at a rate of 92% for those cases accepted for appeal.
In the quick research I just did - they are over turned about 30% more than any other circuit in the US. Heck - they even overturn themselves. First the CA recall is off, then its on...
Life is always entertaining out here on the Left Coast!
I've had the fortune to be affiliated with the Icarus Verilog compiler/simulator effort over the last 3-4 years. The first version of the code had some specific design decisions that made scaling simulations beyond a thousand or so gates impossible.
The author chose to throw out his simulation engine and much of his code generation and adopt a completely new model. It took him the better part of a year to get roughtly where he was with the original code base as far as functionality is concerned. He also has a regression environment with several hundred tests he uses regularly to let him know how he is doing with respect to functionality. About 2 1/2 years into the rewrite period, Icarus is now handling behavioral code of 1 Million gates at about 80% of the performance of commercial tools!
Was the rewrite needed. YES! Did it take awhile. YES! Was it worth the wait. YES!
This was a GREAT post - it's too bad you have the SUV nonsense as a SIG pointing at an article by Ariana "The private jet I flew here on was going there anyway!" Huffington.
"If I can raise money to take over the governement of the United States and install a whole new congress and president"
It depends on how you go about this - if your rhetoric suggests/supports the "violent overthrow" of the government, then that isn't protected by anything - Do not pass GO, go directly to Jail!
From my reading - the young man is initially being held on visa violations, and these charges have just been added. He is innocent until proven guilty - so let's see if the government can make the charges stick!
The very first chip I worked on came back only partially functional, and the part that was broken was my logic:-(
At the time, the respin cost was about $50K!
After 6 weeks of working on the problem, we verified a timing problem in my logic. Now - for those in the know, you would expect static timing analysis to find this - uhm, the company didn't use STA, but rather depended on the library's back-annotated delays and verilog simulations saying a Flop input didn't meet setup or hold timing requirements. So if you didn't excite the slow path in your simulations you wouldn't see it...
We also found that our libraries were 40% slower than the actual silicon we received, i.e. there wasn't any ground-truth in the simulations we were doing anyway.
To make a long story longer - the company wound up making huge changes in their methodology due to this mistake - and I was exonerated because I followed the extant methodology and couldn't have possibly found the problem with the tools in place at the time.
Talk about 6 weeks of hell!
This is a classic story that REALLY happened, cause it happened to someone I went to college with. I got the story from two other folks that saw it happen;-)
This is back in the days when people used "Disk Packs" These were multiple platter disks that you could actually remove from the drive. The guy decided to do some preventive maintenance on the disk drive, so he turned the drive off to remove the pack. Only one problem - the system was hot with real live software developers editing and saving files. The disk pack contents was ruined, and from what I understand, they took over two weeks to recover everything, i.e. getting back to where they were when he did his thing. He didn't work there after that.
The last story I've got is along a similar vane and involves the same disk packs. This happened at my first job a few years before I was hired in. A disk pack failed on a drive, so the tech downs the drive and installs the disk pack on another drive. Well that one doesn't work eithre so he moves it to another drive..so on, and so on, until he ruined 9 seperate drives with a crashed disk pack!
Actually, I blame the principal, the district AND the administrator! I do alot of volunteer work at my son's school as a technologist. I fix the machines, install network runs, etc. I'm also the president of the PTA that pays the two computer lab assistants.
I think this was like dropping a nuke on a kid with a lemonaide stand because they didn't have a business license!
Yep -the kid did the equivalent of a farting noise in the classroom. That is objectionable behavior - so some disciplinary action is reasonable - but suspension?
Further - this district has NO PUBLISHED POLICY on whether this was appropriate behavior or not! So they use the nuclear option! That's shear nonsense...let the punishment fit the crime. Why not a letter home to the parents, and let them discipline the kid???????
In my kid's district there is a published acceptable computer usage policy, a published discipline policy with a graduated response, and a requirment that teachers will oversee the computer usage. Lastly, parents have to sign documents saying they have reviewed all of the above. So no surprises!
In my mind, not having all of these policies in place puts the district and staff in the guilt column right there along with the kid - Gee - you broke a rule I just made up so I'm throwing you out of school. That doesn't play well with me!
Well - it's called the RICO statutes. Hopefully, this will be actionable under RICO. IANAL so not sure.
What I do find interesting is that the letter demands much more response from the licensee than they have a right too under their license. From what I picked up on Groklaw a while back -they can ask you what uP's it's running on and such, but this bit about ensuring that Linux isn't running on those machines, etc. is a bogus question they have no right to ask!
This is a very cognizant post - couldn't say it better myself. I work for a company that DOES outsourcing of high-end technical jobs. My assessment right now is that to send something in my particular space off to staff in India you have to give them a specification that has every detail spelled out, i.e. not that much innovation required or allowed.
In 4-5 years when these guys have been through three,four or five big projects and they have learned the ropes...LOOKOUT!
They now have the tools, the infrastructure, and the background to do just about anything in high-tech. They just lack the direct deep experience. That merely takes time.
With that said, if you really are at the top of your game, you'll be employed, but you won't be making what you were making in 1999.
My own data points suggest that contract labor IN the US is now charging around 1990 rates. So - guess what, the market system DOES work. We were apparently overpaid for what we do and a market correction has occured, i.e. some business moved over-seas and salaries went down.
And no - it didn't feel good, but it is also how capitalism works. See heavy production industries like steel for another example of what is going to happen.
Now - alot of the stuff above is a bit biggoted, if not down-right ignorant. I work with LOTS of Indians, and yes there certainly is a caste system there, though it is technically ilegal. It is also disappearing in the cities (places where tech support is located for instance).
As it was explained to me. If you are in a rural setting (which ALOT of India still is) then everyone in the village knows what your family has been doing for the last 100+ years. That places you directly into a caste situation. As soon as you leave the rural setup, i.e. a large city, better yet, get an education, no-one has a clue as to what caste you were born into. This lets you move around without whatever stigma your "caste" would leave you.
Also note - I chose to post even though I had moderator points available to me...
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Having been on a few DXpeditions myself (to places you can take airplanes too) I need to comment that where these guys are planning on going I imagine there isn't going to be Pizza, running water, or maybe even standing buildings!
Think tents, some generators, and antennas on at a barren location.
What I WOULD suggest to the parties involved is to look into tieing into some naturalist activities. This way you can have a double edged story AND increase your possible audience at the same time.
There was exactly just such a production a few years ago, I believe the expedition went to Hurd Island (maybe some other place in Antartica...) They had a group of naturalists, mountain climbers and amateur radio folks that were each there for their own reasons. Made a pretty reasonable show - and was aired on PBS originally.
Do something along these lines and you might find sponsorship from National Geographic?!?
I tend to agree with abolith's assessment. Further, the moderation system is truly BROKEN when someone who expresses a reasonable opinion without either slander or malice and directly on topic is moderated DOWN.
Back to the point at hand - the cop has probable cause to stop and question them because of the report. Further, he says he is involved in an investigation which is basically saying "I've got probable cause to be talking to you, i.e. not a random molestation of a private citizen.
Next consider this from the officer's point of view (really -try placing yourself in his position for a minute.) He's come upon a guy who is acting hinky. You want to know who you are dealing with for your own safety! You're going to take the guys ID and find out if he's dangerous to you, wanted for some reason, etc. Again - the officer already has stepped over the first hurdle of probable cause because he's responding to a call, and this fellow meets the general description of what he's looking for. For that matter - the guy IS who the officer is looking for! The report may have been inaccurate as to what was really transpiring, but a concerned citizen was doing what we would all hope they would do if we were suffering from spousal abuse, or some other such.
Let me put a different spin on the above.
I've been the manager that had an employee commit sexual harassment of several women in our very small office. He was flagrant about it. I had information from multiple women that he was doing it. (What's worse is the idiot had a wife 7 months pregnant!) He wasn't fired, but was put on notice that it had to stop immediately. That nonsense ended, but he had plenty of OTHER issues that made him a real problem.
When he chose to go to another job, we all wished him well (and were secretly thinking THANK GOD he's going).
I'm not sure I'm willing to accept this claim at face value because it's a bit contrary to some simple facts. What I was taught back in elementary school (CA in the 60's) was that the California central valley was the best farm land in the country because it is essentially a vast flood plain like the Nile. (Then we have the entire Mississippi flood plain to talk about as well.)
Sacramento is not THAT big when compared to the rest of the valley, and the population density in the valley is quite low.
The vast majority of California's population is actually in desert areas (LA and San Diego) that can only exist there because of imported water. This isn't prime agricultural land without the water which "man" would have to bring there anyway -
So I just don't believe the conclusions being reached here concerning the magnitude of the loss.
Two points - don't confuse the ObviousGuy with facts - he wouldn't know one when it stood in front of him, uhm, then again, neither would SCO.
Point two - fox is fair and balanced.
In the US this simply isn't true.
IF the facilities are owned by the company, then you have no privacy. It's as simple as that. Haven't you guys heard of all the neat spyware some employers use to watch the activities of employees? That's all legal in a work setting.
The thing that puts this into a gray zone in my mind is that the company doesn't own the hardware. They own the email address itself to the extent that you own mycompany.com. Yet if this provider is doing this without compensation I would imagine that the hard line I mentioned in the previous paragraph gets gray. IANAL - but that is my understanding of what is allowed.
Well - you can come mighty close to this - and you miss some significant details. If it takes your company 5 engineers to do the job, and Indian based solution can apply 15-25 engineers for a lower cost! Then there is the work ethic these people have -it's significant! I'm not bashing the American work ethic - just commenting that the Indian work ethic is also substantial.
Oh - did I mention that I'm running an India based project? It seems to be going quite well. The real issues are a matter of finding experienced people in India that can manage the local talent. Then there are issues with in-experienced teams needing everything explicitly stated for them. 5 years from now this won't likely be a problem.
So - be afraid. Be very afraid. This trend isn't going to reverse itself.
There one problem with your thesis - the concept of there are only so many good engineers being a big one. When you are talking about TWO separate countries (read both India and China) that have 1 billion people each - and they graduate a huge number of bright people in engineering/CS every year (not to mention those that get educated here..) the supply of engineering talent is vast. The number of jobs is finite for a given economic situation.
Add this to the cost of doing business here in the states, and the salary of US resources and off you go to India/China.
Right now the number of EXPERIENCED engineers in these countries is low -but when you consider the multi-nationals like Intel/IBM/Cisco going there and hiring 3K-5K each - give it 5 years and the experience issue disappears too.
This guy brings up a REALLY GOOD STRATEGY that happens to fall into some advice my Grand Dad gave me years ago. Don't rely on just one career avenue , try to have at least TWO things you are good at. If one area falls away, take up the other career to get you by.
My Grand Dad lived this philosophy. He was a police officer for 25 years. He retired from the force and became a general contractor building houses. His son-in-law (my Dad) picked this up from him. My Dad had at least three careers. He did Electrical Engineering, he did general contracting, and did Real Estate Appraisal.
It's a GOOD idea.
I thought I had it covered - after all I'm can program. I thought that CS was my alternate career. Well - maybe this advice should be modified to TWO UNRELATED Career paths.
I'm a practicing EE - have been for 25 years.
I work for a consulting company that has half their staff in India, i.e. we actively outsource EE work there. Becoming an EE isn't going to protect you from this trend. Doing ANYTHING in high-tech is probably open to being sent over-seas at some level.
The only reason I still have a position (I live in Sillycon Valley) is because I DO have 25 years of experience. I do architecture work, project lead work, etc. I have LOTS of friends who are out of work, and have been for a year or better.
I can safely say that I would recommend someone going for a degree OTHER than EE or CS for the time being. What EVER you do - the fact that you've got some practical experience is going to help you...but the life-long career in EE or CS is really a harder choice than it was when I got into it.
Good Luck!
Hmm - if the guy can't get an ISDN line - he likely can't get a T1 either. ISDN can be repeated so he REALLY must be living in the boonies, or the world's oldest Central office that doesn't support ISDN (or morse code ;-)
Whether you come at this from the left or the right - this court continually comes up with rulings that are on the margin. Hmmm - the Pledge of Allegiance is perhaps the best example. The court is out-of-step with the American Public - they have a HUGE tendancy to legislate from the bench which simply isn't their role.
I was speaking to a friend at lunch a week ago and this very subject came up.
My buddy is teaching a business class at a popular MBA night school. He told us the story of catching a person who had committed plagarism by using such a service. When the student was approached - "Oh I'm sorry, I didn't know - I won't do that again."
He got a 0 for the assignment and the incident was reported to the university.
So in this particular case, the prof was detecting the issue himself by merely looking at the available papers in the free section at a few popular sites.
I guess you might draw the conclusion that plagarists aren't necessarily very clever either.
I'll just point out that this decision was from the 9th Circuit, i.e. The "Silly" Circuit. This group of judges gets overturned at a rate of 92% for those cases accepted for appeal.
In the quick research I just did - they are over turned about 30% more than any other circuit in the US. Heck - they even overturn themselves. First the CA recall is off, then its on...
Life is always entertaining out here on the Left Coast!
I've had the fortune to be affiliated with the Icarus Verilog compiler/simulator effort over the last 3-4 years. The first version of the code had some specific design decisions that made scaling simulations beyond a thousand or so gates impossible.
The author chose to throw out his simulation engine and much of his code generation and adopt a completely new model. It took him the better part of a year to get roughtly where he was with the original code base as far as functionality is concerned. He also has a regression environment with several hundred tests he uses regularly to let him know how he is doing with respect to functionality. About 2 1/2 years into the rewrite period, Icarus is now handling behavioral code of 1 Million gates at about 80% of the performance of commercial tools!
Was the rewrite needed. YES! Did it take awhile. YES! Was it worth the wait. YES!
This was a GREAT post - it's too bad you have the SUV nonsense as a SIG pointing at an article by Ariana "The private jet I flew here on was going there anyway!" Huffington.
"If I can raise money to take over the governement of the United States and install a whole new congress and president"
It depends on how you go about this - if your rhetoric suggests/supports the "violent overthrow" of the government, then that isn't protected by anything - Do not pass GO, go directly to Jail!
From my reading - the young man is initially being held on visa violations, and these charges have just been added. He is innocent until proven guilty - so let's see if the government can make the charges stick!
The very first chip I worked on came back only partially functional, and the part that was broken was my logic :-(
;-)
At the time, the respin cost was about $50K!
After 6 weeks of working on the problem, we verified a timing problem in my logic. Now - for those in the know, you would expect static timing analysis to find this - uhm, the company didn't use STA, but rather depended on the library's back-annotated delays and verilog simulations saying a Flop input didn't meet setup or hold timing requirements. So if you didn't excite the slow path in your simulations you wouldn't see it...
We also found that our libraries were 40% slower than the actual silicon we received, i.e. there wasn't any ground-truth in the simulations we were doing anyway.
To make a long story longer - the company wound up making huge changes in their methodology due to this mistake - and I was exonerated because I followed the extant methodology and couldn't have possibly found the problem with the tools in place at the time.
Talk about 6 weeks of hell!
This is a classic story that REALLY happened, cause it happened to someone I went to college with. I got the story from two other folks that saw it happen
This is back in the days when people used "Disk Packs" These were multiple platter disks that you could actually remove from the drive. The guy decided to do some preventive maintenance on the disk drive, so he turned the drive off to remove the pack. Only one problem - the system was hot with real live software developers editing and saving files. The disk pack contents was ruined, and from what I understand, they took over two weeks to recover everything, i.e. getting back to where they were when he did his thing. He didn't work there after that.
The last story I've got is along a similar vane and involves the same disk packs. This happened at my first job a few years before I was hired in. A disk pack failed on a drive, so the tech downs the drive and installs the disk pack on another drive. Well that one doesn't work eithre so he moves it to another drive..so on, and so on, until he ruined 9 seperate drives with a crashed disk pack!
Yes there is - according to the article, the FBI official has to create a letter documenting that the investigation is for National Security reasons.
Yep - the one Hillary told about Ghandi being a Gas station owner! She is now taking appropriate flak for same...ah darn! ;-)
Actually, I blame the principal, the district AND the administrator! I do alot of volunteer work at my son's school as a technologist. I fix the machines, install network runs, etc. I'm also the president of the PTA that pays the two computer lab assistants.
I think this was like dropping a nuke on a kid with a lemonaide stand because they didn't have a business license!
Yep -the kid did the equivalent of a farting noise in the classroom. That is objectionable behavior - so some disciplinary action is reasonable - but suspension?
Further - this district has NO PUBLISHED POLICY on whether this was appropriate behavior or not! So they use the nuclear option! That's shear nonsense...let the punishment fit the crime. Why not a letter home to the parents, and let them discipline the kid???????
In my kid's district there is a published acceptable computer usage policy, a published discipline policy with a graduated response, and a requirment that teachers will oversee the computer usage. Lastly, parents have to sign documents saying they have reviewed all of the above. So no surprises!
In my mind, not having all of these policies in place puts the district and staff in the guilt column right there along with the kid - Gee - you broke a rule I just made up so I'm throwing you out of school. That doesn't play well with me!
Well - it's called the RICO statutes. Hopefully, this will be actionable under RICO. IANAL so not sure.
What I do find interesting is that the letter demands much more response from the licensee than they have a right too under their license. From what I picked up on Groklaw a while back -they can ask you what uP's it's running on and such, but this bit about ensuring that Linux isn't running on those machines, etc. is a bogus question they have no right to ask!
This is a very cognizant post - couldn't say it better myself. I work for a company that DOES outsourcing of high-end technical jobs. My assessment right now is that to send something in my particular space off to staff in India you have to give them a specification that has every detail spelled out, i.e. not that much innovation required or allowed.
In 4-5 years when these guys have been through three,four or five big projects and they have learned the ropes...LOOKOUT!
They now have the tools, the infrastructure, and the background to do just about anything in high-tech. They just lack the direct deep experience. That merely takes time.
With that said, if you really are at the top of your game, you'll be employed, but you won't be making what you were making in 1999.
My own data points suggest that contract labor IN the US is now charging around 1990 rates. So - guess what, the market system DOES work. We were apparently overpaid for what we do and a market correction has occured, i.e. some business moved over-seas and salaries went down.
And no - it didn't feel good, but it is also how capitalism works. See heavy production industries like steel for another example of what is going to happen.
Now - alot of the stuff above is a bit biggoted, if not down-right ignorant. I work with LOTS of Indians, and yes there certainly is a caste system there, though it is technically ilegal. It is also disappearing in the cities (places where tech support is located for instance).
As it was explained to me. If you are in a rural setting (which ALOT of India still is) then everyone in the village knows what your family has been doing for the last 100+ years. That places you directly into a caste situation. As soon as you leave the rural setup, i.e. a large city, better yet, get an education, no-one has a clue as to what caste you were born into. This lets you move around without whatever stigma your "caste" would leave you.
Also note - I chose to post even though I had moderator points available to me...
Listening to KGO the other day, and Dr. Bill Watenburg(spelling??) a caller asked about this same thing.
Dr. Bill's response was essentially - the numbers are bogus! The numbers were pulled out of thin air!