... and down in Amsterdam, Netherlands (clearly, the most conservative city in Europe), they jail a bunch of travellers coz they were showing off their mobile phones to each other. That, apparently, seemed suspicious enough to warrant an F16 escort back to Schipol, and overnight stay in jail for those poor shmucks.
If you think paranoia is limited to North America, you're badly mistaken.
I'm particularly amused by the fact that it is Canada, and not the US, that scores the highest for 'slashdot' and 'digg', and that India is in the top ten (didn't know Slashdot was that big in India!).
I would have explained that away by saying that these were results for google searches for/. and not actual hits themselves (meaning, if you were a slashdot regular, you wouldn't have searched for it on google), but the cities list is stumping me; why are all those tech-oriented folks in MIT/ Harvard etc (ie, in Cambridge, MA) googling so hard for Slashdot, post-2004? I thought everyone out there knew what slashdot was by 2000/01, about the time VA Linux made its millions.
Cultural astronomy, meaning the traditional branch of astronomy that folks have used to discern calendars, seasons and such for centuries, hasn't really much use for even helio-centricism; the dates at which you harvest your crop, for example, won't change at all even if all the stars were moving white-coloured spots on a huge canvas in the sky.
In short, you really don't have to be a kook (meaning, divine the future, for example) to disregard this new development.
Only in the US. In UK, "Asians" are South Asians, not (South)East Asians.
That, however, still isn't as amusing as this old 1960's edition of a Reader's Digest atlas that I have back home. That lists East Asia as the "Far East", West Asia as "Near East" and South Asia as, you guessed it, "Middle East" (which, of course, makes perfect topographical sense if you were seeing the world through a Euro-centric point of view). Seems that these terms have changed complexion only in the past twenty-five years.
Me? I'm perfectly fine being a multi-layered fruitcake with icing on top.
I get two weeks off from my Singapore-based job with an American concern. I plan to travel to at least two countries for a holiday, both of them more than five hours away by flight. (Of course, I also have a lot less committments without having a family, but heck.)
That's a very insightful point, indeed, to ask if this was a temporary, but well-intended, jump into a higher strata, or a long-term thing. You're right, that makes all the difference in the world; it might even make overtime acceptable.
Not Chinese, but if it counts, I'm dating a Chinese girl and have picked up enough Mandarin to say "Ni hao" [1]:-)
Hypocritical is the word to describe the man releasing this, if he got so much free time, take a look at the Lenovo, Dell, Acer, Asus... etc. Which one have the right to stone Apple?
I'm sure you mean well, but allow me to point this out:- it would be 'hypocritical' only if the person (organization, Mail on Sunday in this case) releasing this report also had similar work-conditions. Because they don't necessarily have such a thing (they're a newspaper), this report isn't quite hypocritical. The criticism might have been unrealistic, given that such work conditions are apparently very common, but all the same, for us in the decadent rest-of-the-world, you can't deny that it is useful, if it were true. I, for one, would see iPods less as pure objects of desire, and more as someone's toil and sweat, perhaps even as the result of a vast enterprise that feeds the top while over-working the bottom. Perhaps, as I stay back late at work, I'll even feel a sense of camaraderie with those poor souls languishing in that electronic city. I don't know if it'll stop me from buying one, but it'll certainly make me think twice.
In particular, I was struck by the following salient points:-
Overtime seems to be defined as being beyond "60 workhours" for a six-day week. That's 10 hours a day.
They've exceeded this, meaning more than 60 work-hours, 35% of the time.
They've worked sundays 25% of time. That is, in a year with 52 weeks, they're getting only 39 work-free days (minus leave, if they get it, and public holidays). This on top of the more than 12 work-hours they've worked in a day.
Dorms are free, but there is a housing allowance. Go figure.
There appears to be overtime pay, but it wasn't clear to me on whether overtime was calculated on top of the regular 8-hour-work-day, or the 10-hour-code-of-conduct-work-day. The payment of this compensation is rather haphazard; so you may or may not get paid overtime.
In short, appears to me that the finer points raised by the original article are true. Whether they are acceptable or not is a wholly new question, and worthy of some analysis; seems to me, that minus culture and pay packages, the conditions seem to be difficult only because the workers don't have a collective bargaining power. I don't get overtime compensation in my IT/tech-consulting job, and have, on occasion, worked for more than 80 hours, but here's the fun part: - I know I can walk away from it all and go find another job with better conditions anytime.
My question as a non-Chinese-with-a-new-found-fascination-for-Chine se-culture, therefore, is this:- we all hear about those plentiful jobs being created in the Pearl Valley and elsewhere, but how easy is it for workers to find new jobs? Or rather, with increasing prosperity in the Chinese economy, what's stopping the job market from ironing these things out and improving work-conditions? I suspect the answer could very well be the structure of the industry out there; perhaps, down below at the bottom of the supply chain, there are only two or three companies making these components?
--
[1] -... and "Wo Ai" to the said damsel at the right moment if and when it comes, but that's neither here nor there, is it.
Yes, the two hours I spent at Toul Sleng Museum in Phnom Penh was one of the few times I've ever felt ashamed to be human. I'm not Cambodian, and in no way can appreciate the Khmer Rouge's violent ideology, but just the sheer thought that someone could come up with such a human depravity gives me the shivers even now.
This isn't a see-my-baddies-are-worse-than-yours pissing contest. Hezbollah could be evil incarnate for as far as I care, I really have no insight into their methods or aims, but let's not bring in comparisons with the Khmer Rouge here. Let's just say that those two years of Khmer Rouge rule should count as the lowest point in the history of our species and leave it at that.
Holy shit, Reuters Singapore? I used to work right next door to their building, even used to have lunches in their excellent canteen! Didn't know they were this cool until now; shoulda slipped a resume or something. (Not that there's anything stopping me now, but heck)
The point is that regressive attitudes are pervasive enough that even if the educated elite at the top levels of politics think it is a good idea, they know enough to expect plenty of pushback from their constituents that they could easily decide that it is not worth the fight.
There was no mention about free access to porno in the linked article. And neither is this a measure to provide free broadband, merely to provide laptops to kids.
The thing bothering me is this. In a discussion on, say, women's rights, I probably would have found much to agree with you. But as things stand, I really don't see why, or how, you could mould "laptops aren't really educational" to "laptops are evil because you can get porno". My snideness is to highlight this logical inconsistency; methinks you've put a lot of words into the educational secretary's mouth.
Apart from the not-too-insignificant issue of having the dough, I'm stopping from switching over to a Mac for three reasons:- a) I haven't really seen a cheap way (ie, not plocking down $300 for an external USB sound card) of hooking my 5.1 surround sound system to a Mac and b) no keyboard layouts for my mother tongue, Telugu (ie, not the UI, just being able to type Unicode characters in the language will do)
My flatmate is a recent convert, and he's fairly okay with the switch. Did take him a week, though, to get used to doing things.
Thank you for your response. I'm sure all of your points successfully demonstrate that the Indian government is banning the free distribution of laptops to school-kids because it isn't progressive enough.
In India, there are basically two kinds of schools the high tuition, exclusive schools run by Christian Convents or rich, privately funded educational institutions, and the 'municipal' schools run by the government.
As a proud "old boy" of a government-run, "public" school, I have to strongly disagree. There are very good schools in the governmental sphere as well, just that they don't advertise that heavily in the local papers.
There's only one very simple thing to understand about India, and that it is big. You might think US or China is big, but compared to the challenges that India presents, they're probably a size M.
Look at it this way. One of the more prominent Tiger economies, Singapore, needed twenty-five years to improve its per-capita income. This is for a country with a population of four million. Now look at India. In 1991, we had the largest concentration of economically-improverished people the world has ever seen (and indeed, if you listen to more jingo-istic voices, the world will ever see), a cool 250+ million.
So you see, the scales are completely different; this isn't about replicating the Asian tech boom, this is about rising from that 1991 morass.
Any mistakes by a contractor meant they were instantly out the door, which explains why a lot of sysadmin jobs are contracted. Mail server went down for an hour? New sysadmin from the agency tomorrow.
That how it works in your part of the world? Scary; I suppose technically I'm a contractor myself for this big American consulting company I won't name, but I get a one month's notice before being shown the door. There's some weasel-clause in my contract about letting me go immediately if I don't have the skills I claimed in the recruitment process, but I figured they can use that for a month, at the maximum.
Is this SOP for handling classified information? I'm genuinely curious about this, coz, to me, that quote amounted to a little less than hand-waving; I mean, it's not as if she referred to any specific document or any event. At best, scare her or warn her or something; now the entire world knows what she was alluding to.
Was the blog for discussing collaboration on developing software? To wit,
Axsmith, 42, said in an interview this week that she thinks of herself as the Erma Bombeck of the intel world, a "generalist" writing about lunch meat one day, the war on terrorism the next. She said she first posted her classified blog in May and no one said a thing. When she asked, managers even agreed to give her the statistics on how many people were entering the site. Her column on food pulled in 890 readers, and people sent her reviews from other intelligence agency canteens. (from the article)
She simply had a blog in a classified intranet, that's all. Now, I really can't form an opinion on whether she outed classified information without reading her entire post, but from the quote in the article ("CC had the sad occasion to read interrogation transcripts in an assignment that should not be made public. And, let's just say, European lives were not saved."), I doubt you can make such a conclusion. She did vaguely claim to have read some information, but if she hadn't been fired, I doubt anyone would pay too much attention to that name-dropping.
In short, I think the CIA and her employer have confused between 'opinion' and 'information'. Wouldn't have blinked if this was some other authoritarian workplace, free-minded people are better off not working in such a workplace anyway, but heck, the CIA is supposed to be in the business of analysing data.
I'm Indian and all that, but can we drop those gratitious references to marches and being an "IT super power" or whatever shit? Propaganda has its uses, but only for totalitarian societies, not a free-thinking, or argumentative society that I always thought my country was.
No, that's my point. If you look at the censorship regimes, if you will, for other media, things are much more clear-cut; movies have the Censor Board (and its subsequent process of appeal), books can't be censored per se, but can be banned for security reasons. Overall, when a movie or a book is restricted in some way, we Indians get to know. With websites, we simply don't know. Therefore, in my book, the IT Act is much more draconian than earlier laws.
While I'm ultimately for a libertarian absolute right to free speech, unlike most others, I do understand, and appreciate, that Indian jurisprudence has had varied yes-but limitations to free speech. I'm actually fine with that, as long as I'm told what's being banned and why. In short, I want my governance mechanisms to be participatory, and not exclusionary; I actually don't give much rift to ideology if we achieve that. But ultimately, I agree; the Supreme Court better decide on this and fast. Ideally, it should come up with some sort of a Miller test, if you will, for cyberspace.
I totally agree that "freedom of press" is important, but we don't see that even in the traditional print medium.
Numbers don't tell you anything about impact. Recent experience tells us that blogs are one of the best ways in organizing people; consider how blogs disseminated information during the 2004 tsunami, or the Mumbai blasts.
Might make sense if, say, Hollywood (or any content-producing industry) is outsourcing stuff to India. That is not what's happening; as my colleague from Burma will tell you, IT outsourcing doesn't quite "need" a free and open society, a closed totalitarian community of trained droids will do just fine.
In short, India's tryst with freedom (to echo Nehru's words) isn't to grab that one extra consulting project; it is, let's face it, the only way so many ethnicities can share a common space and prosper.
Slashdot Mirror
... and down in Amsterdam, Netherlands (clearly, the most conservative city in Europe), they jail a bunch of travellers coz they were showing off their mobile phones to each other. That, apparently, seemed suspicious enough to warrant an F16 escort back to Schipol, and overnight stay in jail for those poor shmucks.
If you think paranoia is limited to North America, you're badly mistaken.
I'm particularly amused by the fact that it is Canada, and not the US, that scores the highest for 'slashdot' and 'digg', and that India is in the top ten (didn't know Slashdot was that big in India!).
I would have explained that away by saying that these were results for google searches for /. and not actual hits themselves (meaning, if you were a slashdot regular, you wouldn't have searched for it on google), but the cities list is stumping me; why are all those tech-oriented folks in MIT/ Harvard etc (ie, in Cambridge, MA) googling so hard for Slashdot, post-2004? I thought everyone out there knew what slashdot was by 2000/01, about the time VA Linux made its millions.
Cultural astronomy, meaning the traditional branch of astronomy that folks have used to discern calendars, seasons and such for centuries, hasn't really much use for even helio-centricism; the dates at which you harvest your crop, for example, won't change at all even if all the stars were moving white-coloured spots on a huge canvas in the sky.
In short, you really don't have to be a kook (meaning, divine the future, for example) to disregard this new development.
One quick, interesting point: (except for Indonesia) seems like the lower you go, the more likely you will find places to outsource to. Hmmmm.
Only in the US. In UK, "Asians" are South Asians, not (South)East Asians.
That, however, still isn't as amusing as this old 1960's edition of a Reader's Digest atlas that I have back home. That lists East Asia as the "Far East", West Asia as "Near East" and South Asia as, you guessed it, "Middle East" (which, of course, makes perfect topographical sense if you were seeing the world through a Euro-centric point of view). Seems that these terms have changed complexion only in the past twenty-five years.
Me? I'm perfectly fine being a multi-layered fruitcake with icing on top.
I get two weeks off from my Singapore-based job with an American concern. I plan to travel to at least two countries for a holiday, both of them more than five hours away by flight. (Of course, I also have a lot less committments without having a family, but heck.)
That's a very insightful point, indeed, to ask if this was a temporary, but well-intended, jump into a higher strata, or a long-term thing. You're right, that makes all the difference in the world; it might even make overtime acceptable.
Not Chinese, but if it counts, I'm dating a Chinese girl and have picked up enough Mandarin to say "Ni hao" [1] :-)
I'm sure you mean well, but allow me to point this out:- it would be 'hypocritical' only if the person (organization, Mail on Sunday in this case) releasing this report also had similar work-conditions. Because they don't necessarily have such a thing (they're a newspaper), this report isn't quite hypocritical. The criticism might have been unrealistic, given that such work conditions are apparently very common, but all the same, for us in the decadent rest-of-the-world, you can't deny that it is useful, if it were true. I, for one, would see iPods less as pure objects of desire, and more as someone's toil and sweat, perhaps even as the result of a vast enterprise that feeds the top while over-working the bottom. Perhaps, as I stay back late at work, I'll even feel a sense of camaraderie with those poor souls languishing in that electronic city. I don't know if it'll stop me from buying one, but it'll certainly make me think twice.
In particular, I was struck by the following salient points:-
In short, appears to me that the finer points raised by the original article are true. Whether they are acceptable or not is a wholly new question, and worthy of some analysis; seems to me, that minus culture and pay packages, the conditions seem to be difficult only because the workers don't have a collective bargaining power. I don't get overtime compensation in my IT/tech-consulting job, and have, on occasion, worked for more than 80 hours, but here's the fun part: - I know I can walk away from it all and go find another job with better conditions anytime.
My question as a non-Chinese-with-a-new-found-fascination-for-Chine se-culture, therefore, is this:- we all hear about those plentiful jobs being created in the Pearl Valley and elsewhere, but how easy is it for workers to find new jobs? Or rather, with increasing prosperity in the Chinese economy, what's stopping the job market from ironing these things out and improving work-conditions? I suspect the answer could very well be the structure of the industry out there; perhaps, down below at the bottom of the supply chain, there are only two or three companies making these components?
--
[1] - ... and "Wo Ai" to the said damsel at the right moment if and when it comes, but that's neither here nor there, is it.
Just make sure you sell the software only to people who haven't had sex as teenagers, then. Problem solved.
As long as you don't use capitals, and if you do, as long as you put (TM) in the end, you're fine.
No, you guys need some Polish.
Yes, the two hours I spent at Toul Sleng Museum in Phnom Penh was one of the few times I've ever felt ashamed to be human. I'm not Cambodian, and in no way can appreciate the Khmer Rouge's violent ideology, but just the sheer thought that someone could come up with such a human depravity gives me the shivers even now.
This isn't a see-my-baddies-are-worse-than-yours pissing contest. Hezbollah could be evil incarnate for as far as I care, I really have no insight into their methods or aims, but let's not bring in comparisons with the Khmer Rouge here. Let's just say that those two years of Khmer Rouge rule should count as the lowest point in the history of our species and leave it at that.
Holy shit, Reuters Singapore? I used to work right next door to their building, even used to have lunches in their excellent canteen! Didn't know they were this cool until now; shoulda slipped a resume or something. (Not that there's anything stopping me now, but heck)
There was no mention about free access to porno in the linked article. And neither is this a measure to provide free broadband, merely to provide laptops to kids.
The thing bothering me is this. In a discussion on, say, women's rights, I probably would have found much to agree with you. But as things stand, I really don't see why, or how, you could mould "laptops aren't really educational" to "laptops are evil because you can get porno". My snideness is to highlight this logical inconsistency; methinks you've put a lot of words into the educational secretary's mouth.
My flatmate is a recent convert, and he's fairly okay with the switch. Did take him a week, though, to get used to doing things.
Thank you for your response. I'm sure all of your points successfully demonstrate that the Indian government is banning the free distribution of laptops to school-kids because it isn't progressive enough.
As a proud "old boy" of a government-run, "public" school, I have to strongly disagree. There are very good schools in the governmental sphere as well, just that they don't advertise that heavily in the local papers.
Look at it this way. One of the more prominent Tiger economies, Singapore, needed twenty-five years to improve its per-capita income. This is for a country with a population of four million. Now look at India. In 1991, we had the largest concentration of economically-improverished people the world has ever seen (and indeed, if you listen to more jingo-istic voices, the world will ever see), a cool 250+ million.
So you see, the scales are completely different; this isn't about replicating the Asian tech boom, this is about rising from that 1991 morass.
That how it works in your part of the world? Scary; I suppose technically I'm a contractor myself for this big American consulting company I won't name, but I get a one month's notice before being shown the door. There's some weasel-clause in my contract about letting me go immediately if I don't have the skills I claimed in the recruitment process, but I figured they can use that for a month, at the maximum.
Is this SOP for handling classified information? I'm genuinely curious about this, coz, to me, that quote amounted to a little less than hand-waving; I mean, it's not as if she referred to any specific document or any event. At best, scare her or warn her or something; now the entire world knows what she was alluding to.
Was the blog for discussing collaboration on developing software? To wit,
She simply had a blog in a classified intranet, that's all. Now, I really can't form an opinion on whether she outed classified information without reading her entire post, but from the quote in the article ("CC had the sad occasion to read interrogation transcripts in an assignment that should not be made public. And, let's just say, European lives were not saved."), I doubt you can make such a conclusion. She did vaguely claim to have read some information, but if she hadn't been fired, I doubt anyone would pay too much attention to that name-dropping.
In short, I think the CIA and her employer have confused between 'opinion' and 'information'. Wouldn't have blinked if this was some other authoritarian workplace, free-minded people are better off not working in such a workplace anyway, but heck, the CIA is supposed to be in the business of analysing data.
I'm Indian and all that, but can we drop those gratitious references to marches and being an "IT super power" or whatever shit? Propaganda has its uses, but only for totalitarian societies, not a free-thinking, or argumentative society that I always thought my country was.
No, that's my point. If you look at the censorship regimes, if you will, for other media, things are much more clear-cut; movies have the Censor Board (and its subsequent process of appeal), books can't be censored per se, but can be banned for security reasons. Overall, when a movie or a book is restricted in some way, we Indians get to know. With websites, we simply don't know. Therefore, in my book, the IT Act is much more draconian than earlier laws.
While I'm ultimately for a libertarian absolute right to free speech, unlike most others, I do understand, and appreciate, that Indian jurisprudence has had varied yes-but limitations to free speech. I'm actually fine with that, as long as I'm told what's being banned and why. In short, I want my governance mechanisms to be participatory, and not exclusionary; I actually don't give much rift to ideology if we achieve that. But ultimately, I agree; the Supreme Court better decide on this and fast. Ideally, it should come up with some sort of a Miller test, if you will, for cyberspace.
And oh, this Indian does use toilet paper. :-)
Numbers don't tell you anything about impact. Recent experience tells us that blogs are one of the best ways in organizing people; consider how blogs disseminated information during the 2004 tsunami, or the Mumbai blasts.
In short, India's tryst with freedom (to echo Nehru's words) isn't to grab that one extra consulting project; it is, let's face it, the only way so many ethnicities can share a common space and prosper.