Where? The United States of America? Have
you ever heard of the INS and the Coast Guard?
Part of their jobs - paid for by the American
taxpayer - is precisely to keep poor foreigners
out.
Its [not] like we're shipping our computer
crap over there and forcing it on them. Its
bought by companies over there, and shipped.
Those companies employ people to process the
material. Its not my fault that they don't use
respirators!
I'm not going to discuss "fault", because
that's not the point. However, consider the
high probability that if the manufacturers of
these toxic products were required by law to
retrieve and recycle these products
properly, the original sticker price
would probably be considerably higher for you.
The stuff mights still end up in China, but
now the company employing the poor peasants
can afford proper equipment.
The question is, are you willing to pay for
this?
For crying out loud... there's a reason why we're the #1 industrialized nation, and they're a "3rd world" nation, and its not because we've spend hundreds of years feeling guilty for other nations.
Indeed, it isn't. For the majority of your
country's short history, you barely felt sorry
for the Africans you kidnapped and enslaved,
or the native Americans whose land you took at
gunpoint. Don't even get me started on the
other countries that America actually went and
colonized.
Maybe that's not your fault either, but please
don't imagine that you got where you are
without exploiting other people. Some of us
actually read history books.
More importantly, the level of detail and
realism on this thing - which is impressive -
is really the kind I expect private hobbyists
to pay for. Using a grant to pay for these
niceties (as opposed to a functional and
educationally adequate simulator) seems
excessive.
From the construction page:
In my simulator, they weren't really
necessary, [...] this was no easy (or inexpensive) metal work.
To increase the realism even further,
everywhere on the panels where there was
a line drawing of a screw or bolt, I put
an actual screw or bolt.
set of three custom-designed and -built
clocks [...] is an incredible system - the
parts alone cost over $1000.00
Makes you wonder what the funds could've
been used for...
let us assume that the gliding pre-bat
was equipped to survive. Why isn't it still
around?
Many possible reasons. It may eat the same
thing as a bat or a rat, and cannot gather
food as efficiently as either. It may
require a habitat (temperature, etc) that is
no longer around.
Why isn't there any fossil record of it?
Maybe there aren't too many of them, so the
odds of finding one are low. Maybe they're
small, and easy to miss when digging. Maybe
they look a lot like a rat or a bat, and were
actually found but ignored.
How many dinosaurs have lived, over a period
of over 100 million years? How many have we
found?
If they were a viable species why didn't
they continue to live?
Uh, because things change? Humans are a very
viable species today, numbering in the
billions. What if a sufficiently large
asteriod hits tomorrow?
Your main problem is that you are trying to
draw a conclusion out of ignorance, not out
of knowledge. We don't know why the pre-bat
isn't around, therefore. We don't know why
we haven't found any fossils, therefore.
Science doesn't work that way.
Air molecules are not randomly arranged in a
room. You cannot discount that before applying
statistical analysis! What are the
odds that your office trash bin will be empty
tomorrow morning? In a random universe, who
knows? Here, probably close to 1.0 if you hire
someone to empty the trash bins at night, and
probably close to 0.0 if you don't. This is
because trash doesn't move randomly.
On the other hand, isn't it more likely that a
"venerable statistician" really does understand
the difference, but is simply selecting less
precise language for the benefit of
non-mathematicians?
Mac users are more often than not die-hard Apple users and as such are more likely to view Apple favorably, independent of the service they receive.
First of all, you need to prove this. How much
noise a person or group makes is not evidence
of their lack of independent thinking.
Secondly, so what? Are you suggesting we should
exclude "fundamentalists" from voting, because
they'll probably "psychologically jump through
hoops to rationalize nearly every aspect of
their" political belief?
What you suggest, if true, is an interesting
phenomenon. It has, however, exactly zero
relevance in a poll. An extremist opinion is
just as important as yours.
The fact, however, is that offices (where the
cumulative effects of spam over many employees
is far more costly than at home) tend to buy
bandwidth in bulk. Thus, spam doesn't really
cost you more money.
As for disk space, don't you delete your spam?
Which brings us to time. The problem is, even
though you could argue that deleting spam costs
productivity, chances are you aren't really
working all of eight hours each day. In fact,
deleting spam probably takes time away from
surfing the net. Put simply, people who
question MPAA/RIAA estimates on piracy should
similarly question estimates on the cost of
spam. Especially if they're reading Slashdot.
This is not to say that junk email is any less
annoying than any other kind of unsolicited
mailing, just that it's easier to defend than
a pile of paper literally wasted.
1) Make your repository a mountable file system, supporting multiple types of connection, NFS, SMB, Active Directory, FTP, etc.. When connecting you must specify a profile to be used.
I have used ClearCase for several years, and I
appreciate its many advantages, especially when applied to a large group of on-site developers. In this post, however, I limit myself to the downsides:
Build times are constrained by network speed. This is a smaller problem in a local
network, but for a wide area collaboration,
practically excludes dial-up users. Good caching can alleviate the problem, but there's still going to be substantial handshaking to ensure that your cached versions are correct (remember that ClearCase's LATEST tag can refer to different files each time).
When you disconnect from the network,
you disconnect from the code. This makes it
difficult to pick up your laptop and quickly head
to a meeting.
2) Make every user have a number of profiles (Min:1) (like ClearCase views), these profiles contain -all- the info needed to access file versions correctly. They should allow sharing ('base my profile X on the profile Y created by user Z'). And support concepts such as labelling, conditional branching, etc..
One thing ClearCase lacks, AFAIR, is the ability to map a server-side file to a different name on the client. For example, files like config.h tend to be checked out by all developers, and rarely checked back in. An alternate solution is to map config.h to config.h.server (or something) and make a local writable copy as scratchpad.
Also, multi-site development could be improved, even for ClearCase. It makes a lot of sense, especially for a large open source project, to have source control servers at least on each continent where developers reside.
Finally (and not negligibly at all), ClearCase tends to need full-time specialists like you to maintain it. No offense, but I have to count that as a disadvantage under many settings.
The technology has mostly fallen into place. The
cost of recording and editing music has come
down to something a souped up home computer
can do. The cost of distribution has come down,
too, in the form of a website. I think it is now
possible for an independent artist to sell you a
song for $1.
The missing piece now is promotion - how could
the audience learn about a musician they would
like, without spending an insane number of hours
sampling music? The most direct solution would
be the "if you liked this, you might also like this
other thing" recommendations you'd see at video
stores or Amazon, but it should also be possible
to develop software to analyze submissions from
artists, and play them over niche Internet radio
channels with little or no (expensive) human
intervention.
As a practicing physician (and software engineer since 1978, so don't get in a hissy fit), I have very little use for the program. Not that I don't find the idea of an expert system for diagnosis to be interesting, but it's clinically useless for most of us.
You have the appropriate qualification to answer
this question then: why can't there be software
for doctors to do what Lint does for programmers?
In most cases, the Lint or compiler warnings are
well understood and easily fixed by a competent
programmer, yet we don't say that these tools are
useless.
I don't disagree with your overall point, but there
are some mitigating facts that should be pointed
out.
A CISC instruction ran at 250 MIPS may do the
same work as 4 RISC instructions running at
1000 MIPS. This is why MIPS are meaningless.
The conventional RISC system has fixed width,
and generally long, instructions. This enables
easy pipelining, because you don't have to parse
the current instruction to figure out where the next
one starts. This directly causes the RISC system
to require a bigger cache to keep the CPU fed with
the same amount of work. This means that some
of the CPU die savings have to be reinvested in
cache.
Similarly, the RISC system would need more RAM
to avoid swapping.
These factors even out the game somewhat. In
fact, I'd go out on a limb to say that there's no
such thing as a faster processor independent of
a memory subsystem. Intel's crippling of the
original Celeron with a tiny cache is a case in
point.
In summary, system performance is not about
maximizing each attribute (CPU clock, cache size,
disk RPM, etc), but in putting together a system
that is balanced. In fact, "stream" performance
may not even be a great deal. I would not mind
a CPU that switches down to maybe 300 MHz
when I'm typing, and surges to its top speed when
I'm compiling.
Build anew and you get a faster sleeker more efficient more reliable OS. This is great news even if it might take 6 years before it has the functionality of current OSes that are offered.
[I am assuming that we are talking about building
software for purposes other than personal fun
or some quasi-political objective, because
you are making a technical argument.]
Faster? While you're catching up with
functionality, people are optimizing the
current OSes. Notice how many Linux kernel
developers are working on improving multiprocessing and scalability. Apple's
upcoming Jaguar enhances the GUI to offload
drawing to the graphics card, which should
result in more free time in the main CPU.
Meanwhile, the new OS is probably still trying
to get the parallel port or USB or PCMCIA to
work.
More efficient? I don't remember exactly
when, but the introduction of kernel modules
into Linux made the kernel take up less space
without requiring custom kernels. This is
not likely to be something a new OS does
before 1.0.
More reliable? How would the new OS be more
reliable than one that has been deployed in
many real world situations, sometimes far beyond
what even the original author had imagined
(Linus, for example, didn't exactly see that
Linux would be fighting Solaris head-on when
he started out.)
A lot of times, it's better to find a good base
and build on top of that. Software doesn't
wear out just because it's old. Software
development generally come in two steps: make
it work, and then maybe make it work better.
New software will always have to pay for the
"make it work" part first, better architecture
or not. To exaggerate a bit, new software should
be viewed as poorer by default, until it can be
proven otherwise.
Common criminals are known to threaten or
kill police officers. Your local military force is
designed to threaten or kill enemy military
forces, and definitely threatens vital enemy
infrastructure like power stations and dams.
Moreover, directly attacking civilian populations
is something that was done regularly as late
as WWII, even by the Allies. Hiroshima and
Nagasaki were not entirely military targets.
I'm not defending the terrorists. I'm suggesting
that perhaps your criteria for determining who
they are need to be tightened somewhat.
How many of those who think this should be
constitutional have ever lived for some period
among people of another religion?
It's not a big deal, but the world will be that much
better a place if the majorities everywhere show
a little sensitivity to the minorities. This ruling
does not mean anybody cannot say "so help
me God" or "one Nation under God" or whatever
you please. It means that your Government
cannot require children of another religion to
recite it. Is that really so much to ask? Think
about it - the kids will either recite along and
not really mean it, or just silently omit that
phrase. I didn't grow up in the US, but that's
exactly what I did. So what did requiring me
to mouth these really gain except some
resentment?
This makes more sense in higher level courses,
where copying the basic blocks (like a sorting
routine) does not get in the way of educating
you on how to build larger programs.
However, in an introductory course, sometimes
seeing a solution once avoids enough work for
me to consider that cheating. Where I come
from, we punish those who show their work to
classmates as well as those who look at it.
It never ceases to amaze me that the major
record companies don't see *free advertising*
when it's in front of their faces. Those folks
who pirate content and don't end up buying that
content wouldn't have purchased it in the first
place, so there is no net loss.
This is a common and valid argument, but I
don't think this is the record company's fear.
What they truly fear is the emergence of a
viable on-line distribution network that
involves proper payment. This will either
enable artists to self-publish, or to sign up
with much smaller publishers to retain a
bigger slice of the lower price. Remember
that good recording equipment are no longer
so prohibitively expensive only the record
company can afford them.
The way to destroy the RIAA is to show the
artists that they will make just as much or
even more money if we cut out the middleman.
Piracy will not do that.
I'd rather [lawyers] try to get the minimum
penalty for thier clients when they know they're
guilty, rather than allow criminal behaviour to
go un-punished. Justice and all that.
In many judicial systems, the jury has the main
responsibility of determining guilt, based on
their evaluation of permissible evidence. Your
idea is flawed at least in the following ways:
First, you are replacing the judgement of a
dozen jurors with the judgement of one or two
lawyers. This creates more room for prejudice
of all sorts, and essentially makes it impossible to prosecute a lawyer who pleads his client to
a more severe punishment than necessary. The
lawyer just has to say: "I honestly thought he
was guilty."
Second, these lawyers are permitted to see a
range of evidence - including illegally obtained
evidence - that will color their
judgement. Jurors are simply not told about
these illegal evidence, and so it will taint
them less.
Third, it will greatly reduce the
things that a client tells the lawyer, because
they will fear what the lawyer might think.
This is detrimental to justice because some of
these facts might actually exonerate the
client.
For this and other reasons, lawyers must be
required to act entirely on their client's
best interests, not on their personal judgement of the client's guilt or innocense.
That makes no difference. What you need to
understand is that the corporate interest is
in maximum profit, while the consumer interest
is in having the best product most cheaply.
These are not fundamentally incompatible, but
are also not necessarily compatible. If
there's something you want a corporation to
do (clean up oil slick, open source code, etc),
show them how it is in their interest to do so.
How do we know that they won't try to shut
down someone doing something that they don't
expect or like later?
By assuming they will. Specifically, this means
you should go download a copy of whatever
Sony publishes, and keep it around in case they
change their minds and yank it from their
website.
Sony, or any other large corporation, is not a
single entity. Managers and policies change
all the time. Get used to it.
VisiCalc was the first electronic spreadsheet.
Lotus 1-2-3 destroyed it, and became so successful in the market that at least three competitors (including Excel) supported 1-2-3 keystrokes for compatibility. Excel now
dominates.
WordStar, at one point, was the only viable word processor. Word now dominates.
Netscape Navigator, at one time, had over 70% of the web browser market share. Internet Explorer
now dominates.
I can empathize with your situation, but I
cannot agree with your response.
Alan Cox is not a US citizen. Red Hat is a
US company based in North Carolina. Whether
or not you can program like Alan Cox can,
have you even thought of complaining
about that? Oh, and Linus Torvalds was not
born in America, either. Should Transmeta
have hired an American instead? Funnier still,
Windows and Word were heralded as examples of
how smart and productive American programmers
are! Am I really reading Slashdot?
Sarcasm aside, there's no such thing as an
"American job". When Toyota and Honda build
cars for American consumers, they manufacture
at least some of those cars in the US*. Did
they steal Japanese jobs? Qualified or not -
and I'm not saying you aren't - you are
not entitled to a job.
* They may have been required to. In any
case, are you complaining that they're not
building all their cars in Japan?
The question is so full of holes it really seems
to be a troll.
"A very large programming project" is not one
that would take four programmers six months to
complete. According to Counting
Source Lines of Code, Linux represents
some 8,000 person-years of development time.
Why would a "small programming team [of 5]"
be given "a very large programming project"?
It's your job to point out to your
boss why this is doomed to failure.
You have been given "deep pockets" to hire
"four or five" Indian programmers? Let's be
generous, and say that you're paying each
Indian programmer $30K a year. That's a
budget of $75K for the six month job. That's
"deep pockets" to you? $75K is your idea of
a budget for a "very large programming
project"?
Given all this, I don't think you are qualified
to manage a software engineering project,
especially a very challenging one that involves
remote development.
Slashdot Mirror
Where? The United States of America? Have you ever heard of the INS and the Coast Guard? Part of their jobs - paid for by the American taxpayer - is precisely to keep poor foreigners out.
So I ask again, where?
I'm not going to discuss "fault", because that's not the point. However, consider the high probability that if the manufacturers of these toxic products were required by law to retrieve and recycle these products properly, the original sticker price would probably be considerably higher for you.
The stuff mights still end up in China, but now the company employing the poor peasants can afford proper equipment.
The question is, are you willing to pay for this?
For crying out loud... there's a reason why we're the #1 industrialized nation, and they're a "3rd world" nation, and its not because we've spend hundreds of years feeling guilty for other nations.
Indeed, it isn't. For the majority of your country's short history, you barely felt sorry for the Africans you kidnapped and enslaved, or the native Americans whose land you took at gunpoint. Don't even get me started on the other countries that America actually went and colonized.
Maybe that's not your fault either, but please don't imagine that you got where you are without exploiting other people. Some of us actually read history books.
From the construction page:
In my simulator, they weren't really necessary, [...] this was no easy (or inexpensive) metal work.
To increase the realism even further, everywhere on the panels where there was a line drawing of a screw or bolt, I put an actual screw or bolt.
set of three custom-designed and -built clocks [...] is an incredible system - the parts alone cost over $1000.00
Makes you wonder what the funds could've been used for...
In fact, how can any poll claim any validity without including Cowboy Neal as an option?
Many possible reasons. It may eat the same thing as a bat or a rat, and cannot gather food as efficiently as either. It may require a habitat (temperature, etc) that is no longer around.
Why isn't there any fossil record of it?
Maybe there aren't too many of them, so the odds of finding one are low. Maybe they're small, and easy to miss when digging. Maybe they look a lot like a rat or a bat, and were actually found but ignored.
How many dinosaurs have lived, over a period of over 100 million years? How many have we found?
If they were a viable species why didn't they continue to live?
Uh, because things change? Humans are a very viable species today, numbering in the billions. What if a sufficiently large asteriod hits tomorrow?
Your main problem is that you are trying to draw a conclusion out of ignorance, not out of knowledge. We don't know why the pre-bat isn't around, therefore. We don't know why we haven't found any fossils, therefore. Science doesn't work that way.
On the other hand, isn't it more likely that a "venerable statistician" really does understand the difference, but is simply selecting less precise language for the benefit of non-mathematicians?
First of all, you need to prove this. How much noise a person or group makes is not evidence of their lack of independent thinking.
Secondly, so what? Are you suggesting we should exclude "fundamentalists" from voting, because they'll probably "psychologically jump through hoops to rationalize nearly every aspect of their" political belief?
What you suggest, if true, is an interesting phenomenon. It has, however, exactly zero relevance in a poll. An extremist opinion is just as important as yours.
But how many times bigger than Texas is that?
As for disk space, don't you delete your spam?
Which brings us to time. The problem is, even though you could argue that deleting spam costs productivity, chances are you aren't really working all of eight hours each day. In fact, deleting spam probably takes time away from surfing the net. Put simply, people who question MPAA/RIAA estimates on piracy should similarly question estimates on the cost of spam. Especially if they're reading Slashdot.
This is not to say that junk email is any less annoying than any other kind of unsolicited mailing, just that it's easier to defend than a pile of paper literally wasted.
use gdb to get rid of bugs.
Damn, it's going to be Windows 95?!
I have used ClearCase for several years, and I appreciate its many advantages, especially when applied to a large group of on-site developers. In this post, however, I limit myself to the downsides:
- Build times are constrained by network speed. This is a smaller problem in a local
network, but for a wide area collaboration,
practically excludes dial-up users. Good caching can alleviate the problem, but there's still going to be substantial handshaking to ensure that your cached versions are correct (remember that ClearCase's LATEST tag can refer to different files each time).
- When you disconnect from the network,
you disconnect from the code. This makes it
difficult to pick up your laptop and quickly head
to a meeting.
2) Make every user have a number of profiles (Min:1) (like ClearCase views), these profiles contain -all- the info needed to access file versions correctly. They should allow sharing ('base my profile X on the profile Y created by user Z'). And support concepts such as labelling, conditional branching, etc..One thing ClearCase lacks, AFAIR, is the ability to map a server-side file to a different name on the client. For example, files like config.h tend to be checked out by all developers, and rarely checked back in. An alternate solution is to map config.h to config.h.server (or something) and make a local writable copy as scratchpad.
Also, multi-site development could be improved, even for ClearCase. It makes a lot of sense, especially for a large open source project, to have source control servers at least on each continent where developers reside.
Finally (and not negligibly at all), ClearCase tends to need full-time specialists like you to maintain it. No offense, but I have to count that as a disadvantage under many settings.
The missing piece now is promotion - how could the audience learn about a musician they would like, without spending an insane number of hours sampling music? The most direct solution would be the "if you liked this, you might also like this other thing" recommendations you'd see at video stores or Amazon, but it should also be possible to develop software to analyze submissions from artists, and play them over niche Internet radio channels with little or no (expensive) human intervention.
The middleman has reasons to be afraid.
You have the appropriate qualification to answer this question then: why can't there be software for doctors to do what Lint does for programmers? In most cases, the Lint or compiler warnings are well understood and easily fixed by a competent programmer, yet we don't say that these tools are useless.
A CISC instruction ran at 250 MIPS may do the same work as 4 RISC instructions running at 1000 MIPS. This is why MIPS are meaningless.
The conventional RISC system has fixed width, and generally long, instructions. This enables easy pipelining, because you don't have to parse the current instruction to figure out where the next one starts. This directly causes the RISC system to require a bigger cache to keep the CPU fed with the same amount of work. This means that some of the CPU die savings have to be reinvested in cache.
Similarly, the RISC system would need more RAM to avoid swapping.
These factors even out the game somewhat. In fact, I'd go out on a limb to say that there's no such thing as a faster processor independent of a memory subsystem. Intel's crippling of the original Celeron with a tiny cache is a case in point.
In summary, system performance is not about maximizing each attribute (CPU clock, cache size, disk RPM, etc), but in putting together a system that is balanced. In fact, "stream" performance may not even be a great deal. I would not mind a CPU that switches down to maybe 300 MHz when I'm typing, and surges to its top speed when I'm compiling.
[I am assuming that we are talking about building software for purposes other than personal fun or some quasi-political objective, because you are making a technical argument.]
Faster? While you're catching up with functionality, people are optimizing the current OSes. Notice how many Linux kernel developers are working on improving multiprocessing and scalability. Apple's upcoming Jaguar enhances the GUI to offload drawing to the graphics card, which should result in more free time in the main CPU. Meanwhile, the new OS is probably still trying to get the parallel port or USB or PCMCIA to work.
More efficient? I don't remember exactly when, but the introduction of kernel modules into Linux made the kernel take up less space without requiring custom kernels. This is not likely to be something a new OS does before 1.0.
More reliable? How would the new OS be more reliable than one that has been deployed in many real world situations, sometimes far beyond what even the original author had imagined (Linus, for example, didn't exactly see that Linux would be fighting Solaris head-on when he started out.)
A lot of times, it's better to find a good base and build on top of that. Software doesn't wear out just because it's old. Software development generally come in two steps: make it work, and then maybe make it work better. New software will always have to pay for the "make it work" part first, better architecture or not. To exaggerate a bit, new software should be viewed as poorer by default, until it can be proven otherwise.
Threatening harm to non-combatants
Attacking or killing police or military forces
Threatening harm to police or military forces
Threatening vital public infrastructure
Common criminals are known to threaten or kill police officers. Your local military force is designed to threaten or kill enemy military forces, and definitely threatens vital enemy infrastructure like power stations and dams.
Moreover, directly attacking civilian populations is something that was done regularly as late as WWII, even by the Allies. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not entirely military targets.
I'm not defending the terrorists. I'm suggesting that perhaps your criteria for determining who they are need to be tightened somewhat.
It's not a big deal, but the world will be that much better a place if the majorities everywhere show a little sensitivity to the minorities. This ruling does not mean anybody cannot say "so help me God" or "one Nation under God" or whatever you please. It means that your Government cannot require children of another religion to recite it. Is that really so much to ask? Think about it - the kids will either recite along and not really mean it, or just silently omit that phrase. I didn't grow up in the US, but that's exactly what I did. So what did requiring me to mouth these really gain except some resentment?
However, in an introductory course, sometimes seeing a solution once avoids enough work for me to consider that cheating. Where I come from, we punish those who show their work to classmates as well as those who look at it.
This is a common and valid argument, but I don't think this is the record company's fear. What they truly fear is the emergence of a viable on-line distribution network that involves proper payment. This will either enable artists to self-publish, or to sign up with much smaller publishers to retain a bigger slice of the lower price. Remember that good recording equipment are no longer so prohibitively expensive only the record company can afford them.
The way to destroy the RIAA is to show the artists that they will make just as much or even more money if we cut out the middleman. Piracy will not do that.
In many judicial systems, the jury has the main responsibility of determining guilt, based on their evaluation of permissible evidence. Your idea is flawed at least in the following ways:
First, you are replacing the judgement of a dozen jurors with the judgement of one or two lawyers. This creates more room for prejudice of all sorts, and essentially makes it impossible to prosecute a lawyer who pleads his client to a more severe punishment than necessary. The lawyer just has to say: "I honestly thought he was guilty."
Second, these lawyers are permitted to see a range of evidence - including illegally obtained evidence - that will color their judgement. Jurors are simply not told about these illegal evidence, and so it will taint them less.
Third, it will greatly reduce the things that a client tells the lawyer, because they will fear what the lawyer might think. This is detrimental to justice because some of these facts might actually exonerate the client.
For this and other reasons, lawyers must be required to act entirely on their client's best interests, not on their personal judgement of the client's guilt or innocense.
That makes no difference. What you need to understand is that the corporate interest is in maximum profit, while the consumer interest is in having the best product most cheaply. These are not fundamentally incompatible, but are also not necessarily compatible. If there's something you want a corporation to do (clean up oil slick, open source code, etc), show them how it is in their interest to do so.
How do we know that they won't try to shut down someone doing something that they don't expect or like later?
By assuming they will. Specifically, this means you should go download a copy of whatever Sony publishes, and keep it around in case they change their minds and yank it from their website.
Sony, or any other large corporation, is not a single entity. Managers and policies change all the time. Get used to it.
VisiCalc was the first electronic spreadsheet. Lotus 1-2-3 destroyed it, and became so successful in the market that at least three competitors (including Excel) supported 1-2-3 keystrokes for compatibility. Excel now dominates.
WordStar, at one point, was the only viable word processor. Word now dominates.
Netscape Navigator, at one time, had over 70% of the web browser market share. Internet Explorer now dominates.
It's not that simple.
Alan Cox is not a US citizen. Red Hat is a US company based in North Carolina. Whether or not you can program like Alan Cox can, have you even thought of complaining about that? Oh, and Linus Torvalds was not born in America, either. Should Transmeta have hired an American instead? Funnier still, Windows and Word were heralded as examples of how smart and productive American programmers are! Am I really reading Slashdot?
Sarcasm aside, there's no such thing as an "American job". When Toyota and Honda build cars for American consumers, they manufacture at least some of those cars in the US*. Did they steal Japanese jobs? Qualified or not - and I'm not saying you aren't - you are not entitled to a job.
* They may have been required to. In any case, are you complaining that they're not building all their cars in Japan?
"A very large programming project" is not one that would take four programmers six months to complete. According to Counting Source Lines of Code, Linux represents some 8,000 person-years of development time.
Why would a "small programming team [of 5]" be given "a very large programming project"? It's your job to point out to your boss why this is doomed to failure.
You have been given "deep pockets" to hire "four or five" Indian programmers? Let's be generous, and say that you're paying each Indian programmer $30K a year. That's a budget of $75K for the six month job. That's "deep pockets" to you? $75K is your idea of a budget for a "very large programming project"?
Given all this, I don't think you are qualified to manage a software engineering project, especially a very challenging one that involves remote development.