Indeed, ironic as it might seem to you Americans and Europeans used to watching Indians emigrating to your countries, in sheer numbers, India apparently has one of the largest illegal migrant populations in the world (although that figure is significantly disputed). It is a definite political problem out there in the East and North East; mainstream political support has waxed from being horrific(Morichjhapi) to something else.
The crux of the matter, however, is that the problem is much much more complex than that; you see, Bangladesh exists between, and below, Indian territory on both sides. India is connected to its North East by a stretch of land that's merely twenty kilometres at its thinnest, sandwiched between Nepal and Bangladesh. The result being, trans-shipments between, say, Agartala and Calcutta[*] take shitloads of time; while, in the years before Partition, it was possible to travel between the two towns with an overnight bus journey, it now takes at least seventy two hours to loop around Bangladesh, as it were, and reach Calcutta. Having an open border with Bangladesh, therefore, would actually be rather nice to Indian citizens in at least a couple of ways.
So yeah. Two different continents, two different situations. Let's not compare them.:-)
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[*] - It shalt always be Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras when this Indian speaks in English. I pronounce the city-names differently in different Indian languages.
Bite my shiny metal derrierre for not resisting a Dracula pun, but it's times like this you wish those cannibal stories about Vlad The Impaler were actually true; it'd drive a stake through an errant police system if regular citizenry had enough fangs to raise a garlic stink about these blood-suckers. There is, sadly, no other silver bullet,
OTOH, I have "Microsoft" plastered all over my skillset and work experience, and yet, I found it FUD-worthy when I first read it last weekend.
Now, there are some very valid points in the closed-source-versus-OSS debate, but Ms Benner raises none of them. All that she says is that software is more complex than you can imagine, so in all this grey area, you'd better stick to paid effort, rather than apparently part-time hobby-ist effort that OSS is.
Which, you'd think, is rather short-sighted and significantly misleading for two reasons:- a) "code manipulation", as she puts it, is a given for any large-scale deployment, closed-source or not, and b) most of OSS' growth is actually by corporations, such as Sun, IBM, Google, Red Hat etc. That is, lots of people work on this full-time.
Can't help with Windows Mobile, but Nokia N90 comes close to your needs. Just replace the default Mini-MMC card with a 1 gig version like I did. Battery life is decent; I usually re-charge every three days or so with some 2-3 hours of mp3's and a couple of calls daily. Noticed, though, that the battery life is much worse if I put it in my pocket; apparently, the screen still lights up even if I lock the numeric keypad.
A friend says his 2 gig iPod Nano gives 2-3 hours-ish on full recharge. My 256MB aigo player used to give me at least six-seven hours after I fully recharged the replaceable AAA cell.
Über-cool UI and form factor apart, I'd have to concur with the grandparent; because of battery lifespans, iPods give you much less value than you think.
Oh, personally, I thought it was blindingly obvious that the submitter was trying to be sarcastic. I suppose this is one of those moments when I should rant on how Americans seem to miss subtle humour, but really, how could anyone think the submission was anything but serious?
Hmmmm. Know what, now that I re-read my post, I think must have come across as more snarky than I intended it to be. I'm thinking there's a;-) or two missing somewhere.
And the #1 reason why this will never happen: Iran, simply put, is plainly fucking TOO BIG even for the mighty American Army to conquer. Iran isn't some 20th century political construct that you can shock-and-awe your way into in five days flat; it's a HUGE country that spans from the Caspian Sea to the Gulf, and from Iraq to the outer reaches of South Asia. You'd have to be an Alexander The Great to pull it off, and even at that, at the risk of your army actually deciding to native as they approach the Indus hinterlands.
In short, don't misunderstimate the vulnerability of the American Army.
Precisely! UBS, for instance, had outsourced its network management ops to Polaris, Infosys and some other companies waaay back in December 2003 itself.
The Cydonia region on Mars (the "face") appears to be a natural formation, and not ruins of an ancient Martian civilization.
But.. but, there are folks who call themselves "The Cydonians" among us, and they do like to crack the odd self-deprecating joke!
Seriously though, I agree; aliens and such are our generation's superstitions. Area 51, I sometimes like to think, has a historical precedent that still hasn't died down as yet.
A lot of people in North Asia, you mean. Out here in South East Asia, and certainly in South Asia, there's really no standards alternative to Unicode (other than ISCII, naturally, but I havent heard of any widely used application that implements it)
I'm sorry, but smoking pot does not come under the definition of 'political crimes'. A political prisoner, by definition, is someone arrested for his political beliefs, not for his choice of mind-stimulant.
I don't know if China or the US will come on top in stats; I certainly don't see any reason to believe that the US has any monopoly on free speech or liberal-democratic values. For sure, I'm not even saying that China is closed or totalitarian; most of my PRC friends and colleagues (I'm neither American, nor do I live in the US if you haven't guessed by now) seem to be more knowledgeable, and more outspoken, in their vehemence against the current regime in their country, than what other nationalities (Singaporeans, to take an example) seem to be.
None of this, however, detracts from the fact that the topic being discussed here is political freedom, or the lack of it thereof, and that discussing how many people are jailed without understanding why they are jailed, isn't really a useful point to make.
The stat you want to look for is political prisoners per capita; while plain official prisoner stats tell a lot about the efficiency of the state, there's very little you can say about the context in which the state wields this power, whether it is against street-crime or organized thugs, or indeed, political dissidents.
Not to mention, India's budget allocations for space exploration is miniscule compared to, not just imperial Japan's war-budget, but also to India's own spending on poverty alleviation. Perhaps not compared to primary education or healthcare in some parts, but hey, you weren't complaining about the state of schools in Bastar region were you?
I would submit that the vast majority of software developed does not pertain to this model. This is mostly due to the fact that much of the software being developed out there are deployments on a per-client basis, and those are contractually heavily in favour of the client.
It is only (what I call as) *retail* software that have EULA's as vague as this, and for that, you'd have to blame software manufacturers such as Microsoft and Adobe.
That being the British Commonwealth, naturally, although, admittedly, the other Commonwealth I know of, doesn't quite a once-in-four-years sporting extragavanza.
Personally, I've always explained the British Commonwealth as the bunch of countries that cracked the funniest jokes, but Bollywood lately seems to have taken too much inspiration from its H counterpart for that to be true anymore. Oh well.
Not to mention the fact that Firefox's Korean and zh-CN builds apparently have Yahoo as the default search engine. (Could be wrong here though, someone with a real kr-KR/zh-CN build could confirm this.)
Others fear that Osmanagic's excavations will damage real sites (the hill he calls the "Pyramid of the Sun" is said to have medieval, Roman, and Illyrian remains on it). In one of the few critical accounts of the Bosnian pyramid story, which appeared in the Art Newspaper, the University of Sarejevo's Enver Imamovic, a former director of the National Museum in Sarjevo, is quoted as saying, "This is the equivalent of letting me, an archaeologist, perform surgery in hospitals."
Oh well, I suppose it *is* still quaintly romantic to wish for a hill to automagically become a pyramid.
In short, works well as a political commentary (whether you agree or disagree with him), but falls short as an intended comic narrative.
I think the real reason for that is that Colbert couldn't connect with his audience; had his gags been addressed to a nameless audience on late-night television, they'd have worked, mostly coz the target of the jokes were abstract entities. Otoh, here they were real in flesh-and-blood, and stood only a few feet away from him; methinks most found it difficult to laugh coz it got a bit too personal.
Which is why I think Colbert didn't have the requisite confidence to pull it off successfully on the podium; a couple of bad deliveries here and there, and, suddenly you begin to sense the difference between being wildly funny and saying 'oh well, got a few laughs'. His performance here wsa a bit like Jon Stewart at the Oscars, really, in that neither could successfully convert their comic wit into a live monologue.
Now, here's for the most difficult part, which folks here may or may not appreciate: I think it's possible to say all of this, without commenting, or even agreeing, with his politics.
Slashdot Mirror
The crux of the matter, however, is that the problem is much much more complex than that; you see, Bangladesh exists between, and below, Indian territory on both sides. India is connected to its North East by a stretch of land that's merely twenty kilometres at its thinnest, sandwiched between Nepal and Bangladesh. The result being, trans-shipments between, say, Agartala and Calcutta[*] take shitloads of time; while, in the years before Partition, it was possible to travel between the two towns with an overnight bus journey, it now takes at least seventy two hours to loop around Bangladesh, as it were, and reach Calcutta. Having an open border with Bangladesh, therefore, would actually be rather nice to Indian citizens in at least a couple of ways.
So yeah. Two different continents, two different situations. Let's not compare them. :-)
--
[*] - It shalt always be Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras when this Indian speaks in English. I pronounce the city-names differently in different Indian languages.
Okay, so it wasn't outrageously punny.
Now, there are some very valid points in the closed-source-versus-OSS debate, but Ms Benner raises none of them. All that she says is that software is more complex than you can imagine, so in all this grey area, you'd better stick to paid effort, rather than apparently part-time hobby-ist effort that OSS is.
Which, you'd think, is rather short-sighted and significantly misleading for two reasons:- a) "code manipulation", as she puts it, is a given for any large-scale deployment, closed-source or not, and b) most of OSS' growth is actually by corporations, such as Sun, IBM, Google, Red Hat etc. That is, lots of people work on this full-time.
To be fair to Foreign Policy though, they mention this upfront in their blog entry.
Can't help with Windows Mobile, but Nokia N90 comes close to your needs. Just replace the default Mini-MMC card with a 1 gig version like I did. Battery life is decent; I usually re-charge every three days or so with some 2-3 hours of mp3's and a couple of calls daily. Noticed, though, that the battery life is much worse if I put it in my pocket; apparently, the screen still lights up even if I lock the numeric keypad.
Über-cool UI and form factor apart, I'd have to concur with the grandparent; because of battery lifespans, iPods give you much less value than you think.
Oh, personally, I thought it was blindingly obvious that the submitter was trying to be sarcastic. I suppose this is one of those moments when I should rant on how Americans seem to miss subtle humour, but really, how could anyone think the submission was anything but serious?
Hmmmm. Know what, now that I re-read my post, I think must have come across as more snarky than I intended it to be. I'm thinking there's a ;-) or two missing somewhere.
In short, don't misunderstimate the vulnerability of the American Army.
Xenophobia, clearly, isn't what it used to be.
You bet. In fact, we were using it to generate Excel spreadsheets for our intranet application. Sexy, elegant and plain beautiful code to look at.
... and it's posts like this (ie, parent's) that dont need a +5, Insightful, although this particular post can make do with a +5 , Funny.
Seriously though, I agree; aliens and such are our generation's superstitions. Area 51, I sometimes like to think, has a historical precedent that still hasn't died down as yet.
A lot of people in North Asia, you mean. Out here in South East Asia, and certainly in South Asia, there's really no standards alternative to Unicode (other than ISCII, naturally, but I havent heard of any widely used application that implements it)
I don't know if China or the US will come on top in stats; I certainly don't see any reason to believe that the US has any monopoly on free speech or liberal-democratic values. For sure, I'm not even saying that China is closed or totalitarian; most of my PRC friends and colleagues (I'm neither American, nor do I live in the US if you haven't guessed by now) seem to be more knowledgeable, and more outspoken, in their vehemence against the current regime in their country, than what other nationalities (Singaporeans, to take an example) seem to be.
None of this, however, detracts from the fact that the topic being discussed here is political freedom, or the lack of it thereof, and that discussing how many people are jailed without understanding why they are jailed, isn't really a useful point to make.
The stat you want to look for is political prisoners per capita; while plain official prisoner stats tell a lot about the efficiency of the state, there's very little you can say about the context in which the state wields this power, whether it is against street-crime or organized thugs, or indeed, political dissidents.
Mars, naturally.
But my bad; didn't quite notice that you were denying Moon landings as well.
Not to rain on your parade, but umm, "boundaries of Earth"? Isn't the Earth an oblate spheroid in shape?
Not to mention, India's budget allocations for space exploration is miniscule compared to, not just imperial Japan's war-budget, but also to India's own spending on poverty alleviation. Perhaps not compared to primary education or healthcare in some parts, but hey, you weren't complaining about the state of schools in Bastar region were you?
It is only (what I call as) *retail* software that have EULA's as vague as this, and for that, you'd have to blame software manufacturers such as Microsoft and Adobe.
Personally, I've always explained the British Commonwealth as the bunch of countries that cracked the funniest jokes, but Bollywood lately seems to have taken too much inspiration from its H counterpart for that to be true anymore. Oh well.
Not to mention the fact that Firefox's Korean and zh-CN builds apparently have Yahoo as the default search engine. (Could be wrong here though, someone with a real kr-KR/zh-CN build could confirm this.)
I think the real reason for that is that Colbert couldn't connect with his audience; had his gags been addressed to a nameless audience on late-night television, they'd have worked, mostly coz the target of the jokes were abstract entities. Otoh, here they were real in flesh-and-blood, and stood only a few feet away from him; methinks most found it difficult to laugh coz it got a bit too personal.
Which is why I think Colbert didn't have the requisite confidence to pull it off successfully on the podium; a couple of bad deliveries here and there, and, suddenly you begin to sense the difference between being wildly funny and saying 'oh well, got a few laughs'. His performance here wsa a bit like Jon Stewart at the Oscars, really, in that neither could successfully convert their comic wit into a live monologue.
Now, here's for the most difficult part, which folks here may or may not appreciate: I think it's possible to say all of this, without commenting, or even agreeing, with his politics.