Most people in the developing world don't have families that are an airplane ride away.
You do realize that India is a good half the size of the US, don't you? A kid who comes from southern India to attend a good school in Dehli or Calcutta may easily live a thousand miles away from his family. India isn't like the United States, where there is relative prosperity all around. What prosperity exists is concentrated in a few population centers,
Most immigrants who come over to America are working for the purpose of bringing their family over to join them, so they can settle down and live a secure life in America.
The immigration system in the United States is not one that is set up for keeping extended families together (nor should it be, necessarily). Getting in by yourself, say to attend university and join the workforce, is relatively easy. Getting in with your wife and kids is more difficult, but doable. Getting in with your extended family is pretty much impossible. The only circumstances under which that generally happens is if multiple related families immigrate independently (ie: a guy and his brother both have jobs lined up, and and both bring their wives and kids).
Most immigrant families in the United States, at least legal immigrant families, are cut-off from their extended families. Their parents, grandparents, cousins, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, etc, remain in their country of origin. Due to the high cost of travelling back and forth, as well as the difficulty of getting Visas for extended family members, this isolation is a fairly complete one.
The vast majority of Americans can swing the cost of round-trip tickets between most points in the US to visit their family for Christmas, if this is something they care about. It might not work for a guy working at McDonalds with a family and two kids (if he makes $20k a year, that puts him in the bottom 20% of Americans), but its certainly true for a 50-percentile family making 45k a year.
I forgot to finish the first paragraph. The overhead savings is actually what makes this more attractive then you'd think, because its the same for both types of workers. If you have a guy making $75k in the US, he's costing you about $150k. In India, you could pay him $50k, with maybe another $10k in overhead. That's a total savings of $90k. Or, you could pay a local Indian worker $20k, with an overhead of $10k. Plus, you might incur $10k-$20k in training costs to get this worker up to par. If its a two-year job, we're looking at a savings of $110k for the Indian worker. That $20k difference is probably not enough to get you to take the risk of hiring the Indian worker. The savings from the reduced overhead was so substantial, that the extra savings from a lower salary are much less attractive, given the extra time, risk, and training involved.
Now of course, this isn't really applicable when the job in question is cookie-cutter and there is not a lot of extra training and risk is involved. Such is the risk of working cookie-cutter jobs. That doesn't mean that reverse outsourcing is bogus, however, because it happens all the time. There are tons of Americans at Intel India, for example, for precisely the reasons I outlined.
See your weak link here is believing that corporations care about the quality of life of their staff. Also, keep in mind that they can employ an Indian to do the same job for $10k a year. Why would they waste money on sending an American? Couple this with your savings on overhead, and you can see why reverse outsourcing is ludicrous.
Most successful corporations do care about the quality of life of their staff. Happy workers are much more productive workers. There are examples of ones that don't, but its a leap to make that a blanket epiteth to the entire industry. As for why they might send an American instead of employing an India, the answer is skills. Unless the job is something simple like making widgets or low-level IT, it might be very difficult to find a qualified Indian who can do the same job as an American already in the company's employment. The overhead savings is actually a large part of what makes this more attractive than you'd think.
Ah but that's project control and coordination positions. Thats not reverse outsourcing, thats management. Outsourcing is where you find people who do the same job in other countries on the cheap; what you are talking about is putting in a few people to control all of these new employees.
These projects don't usually break up well into the traditional "management/managed" metaphor. Usually, the actual work of the project is the planning, coordination, logistics, technical support, etc. The workers being coordinated are not usually employees of the company. In healthcare development, for example, they may be doctors and nurses already in the employment of local hospitals.
That's the biggest crock of shit I've read in a long time. Regardless of which country you live in, being in touch with your family is part of what is considered a basic necessity of life.
Yes, and those in the developing world give up that necessity every day. Americans can afford to visit family an airplane ride away on a regular basis. Much of the world can't. Americans almost never face the prospect of having to sever ties with their extended family, just to make a better life for their children. However, that is a sacrifice that millions of immigrants make every year. Americans live in a world in which they have cousins and grandparents and nieces and nephews. Almost every immigrant family lives in a world where there is only the parents and the children, and nobody else.
An American who was born here and whose family was born here leads a blessed life. They face only a fraction of the hardships faced by those elsewhere, and get much more out of life without working nearly as hard. He lives comfortably not because he works the hardest, or because his parents worked the hardest (hard work is life in a rice paddy!) but because he was just damn lucky enough to be born in the United States. Of course, there is no reason he should feel bad about it, luck is after all just dumb luck, but he should realize the nature of his situation. That his place in the world is not the result his inherent worthiness, but just the result of luck. And as the world changes, there is no inherent reason that he should maintain his place in it, no entitlement he can claim to the maintainance of his lifestyle.
No, globalization is the result of greedy bastard corporate pricks who don't have to worry about moving to fucking Bombay in order to keep their jobs.
Globalization is a natural economic force, like supply-and-demand. The "greedy bastard corporate prick", is no more in control of it than a farmer is in control of how he prices his vegetables. He has an illusion of control, in that he's making a decision, but in practice, globalization is the only decision. He can choose a different path, just as a farmer can choose to price his goods at higher than market price, but the market will then just make him irrelevent, favoring those who chose the path the market demands. Even if the United States as a country choses to oppose globalization, the market will make us irrelevent, favoring Europe or Japan instead.
The confluence of the two things leads to a simple, and inevitable, result. As barriers to communication and trade break down around the world markets, both for goods and labor, will become internationalized. As a result, the privleged life Americans enjoy can only be maintained through performance. You want to live a better life than the guy slaving away in a rice paddy? You can no longer do that just by virtue of being American. You have to leverage your skill, intelligence, capital, and hard work to make that be the case.
Yes, disease is a consideration, and it first it can be quite bad. My brother was born in the US, and when he visits Bangladesh, he takes sponge-baths with bottled water, because if he took a shower, he could get sick absorbing pathogens through the skin taking a shower in the local water. However, people who live there for some length of time will develop an immunity. Americans I know who work there regularly rarely get sick, because their bodies are used to the local conditions.
STDs and TB you won't build immunity to, of course, but those are largely non-issues. TB is something that's largely the result of environmental factors, and westerners just won't be subjected to the kind of environment that fosters TB. And of course, westerners won't be having sex with random women, as the cultural barriers to promiscuity in the upper classes are still quite strong.
It's still much cheaper. You can pay an American in India $50K per year, and he can live the way he would in the US for $150K per year. Also, the cost of all the overhead (a rule of thumb is that the total cost of a worker is 2x is salary), is also a lot lower over there.
More generally, it's something that some Americans have been doing for a long time. Anybody who works in foreign development knows somebody who has taken a posting in a developing nation, because it allows them to save a huge amount of their salary.
His point is that the comfortable lives we lead as Americans, including our ability to be constantly in touch with friends and family, is one that we live by virtue of us being Americans, not by virtue of our hard work, etc. What globalization means is the breaking down of that "caste". You don't get to live comfortably just because you're an American. In a way, this sounds egalatarian, but at the same time, its really not what Americans want. We don't want fairness, we don't want equality of opportunity, we want to live more comfortably just through the sheer virtue of being American.
Indians have a take-life-as-it-comes attitude that spills over into every aspect of their life. Urgency, precision, and planning are not familiar concepts to the Indian unstructured lifestyle.
Yes! This will drive many Americans nutty, particularly those from uptight parts of the country (eg: northeast). For those who haven't experienced it: imagine the American South, except worse.
Something as simple as a FIFO line, whether it be at a grocery store or a red light, is not implemented in India. Indians don't stand in line; they cluster. Also, driving in India is something that has to be experienced to be believed!
Yep to that too. Then don't forget the hoking! Whenver your driving in any level of traffic in an Indian city, car horns are going off constantly. In the US, you can go weeks without hearing a car horn.
The infrastructure isn't as bad as Americans might think, and its not as gooda s the Indians want you to believe.
From first-hand experience, I can tell you that on a middle class US salary, you can live like a rich man in India. The western standard of living, with not just indoor plumbing, but central air, a luxurious house, satillite or cable TV, will all be present and accounted for. If you live in a major Indian city, the electricity will be highly reliable as well. You'll also get some perks middle-class westerners are not used to, namely a personal cook, maid, nanny, and often driver. This will be your standard of living at home, and at work, and often at the shopping areas and restaurants other well-to-do Indians frequent.
Now, the bad stuff. Your power will go out more often than here in the states, with how much more often depending on the exact area. Worse of all, as soon as you leave the comfortable world of the upper-classes, which will happen unless you shut yourself in, you'll have to deal with the masses of India's urban poor. Most Americans would not be comfortable wandering around anything but the posh areas of an Indian city. The filth, the poverty, the sheer number of beggers, the traffic, the pollution, etc, are something that are totally alien to all but America's hardened inner-city residents. Then there is the climate --- much of India is tropical, and if you're from a temperate part of the US, the heat and humidity will kill you. Imagine the hottest, most humid day in Georgia or Florida, summer torrential-downpours and all, except 10 degrees hotter, and with more frequent torrential downpours. Last but not least is the pervasive corruption. India is a lot better in this regard than some of its surrounding countries (Pakistan and Bangladesh), but the level of corruption is still something alien to Americans. For as much as Americans bitch about corruption, day-to-day corruption among the rank-and-file beauracracy in the United States is almost non-existant. Living in India, you WILL eventually have to pay a bribe to someone, whether it is to get your phone connected, pay a parking ticket, whatever.
I understand the US-centricity, but what bugs me is that people fail to realize the greater nature of terrorism. Terrorism is just more than something Middle Easterners do to Americans. Its a method of warfare that's been around for a tremendously long time, and has exhibited itself in many different situations. Failing to understand that is failing to understand the basic threat that we as Americans face.
The "they want to kill or convert us" bullshit is wearing thin. A movement of this size cannot be sustained just through sheer religious zealotry. It would be historically unprecedented, and if there is one thing that is sure, is that there is nothing new under the Sun.
Your sort of attitude is one that does not lend itself to understanding the problem. If you can't understand the problem, you can't solve the problem. You're just like a medieval "doctor", whose only solution to an infection is cut off the offending appendage, and hope the infection doesn't spread elsewhere. Indeed, its an attitude that does not lend itself to solving the problem at all. The only recourse your thinking allows is "fight the terrorists", which isn't a solution. You can't possibly kill them all, so you've basically surrendered to a lifetime of perpetual war. Your proposition is a losing one.
The use of the word "appeasement" is also fairly entertaining. Americans tend to look at all events through the historical perspective of WWII, probably because its the one tiny bit of history they know. Well, there is a lot more history in existence, and that history gives us a lot of insight into our present problem, which, despite what the ignorant believe, is not one without historical precedent. Trying to actually solve the problem, instead of just fighting it out and hoping that the basic facts of nature change themselves, is not "appeasement". The problem here is that we're intervening in the affairs of the Middle East. We're propping up regimes that the people of the Middle East don't want there, and we're supporting a minority nation that is throughly antagonistic to all of its neighbors. We're basically fucking with the Middle East, and now we're pissed that they're fucking back. It makes no sense to be pissed --- its a law of nature. You fuck with somebody, they'll fuck you back. We're better of expecting gravity to change than expecting human nature to change. The solution is to stop fucking with the Middle East, and we should not avoid doing it just because that's what the terrorists want. Otherwise, we're like a man who keeps his hand on a hot stove, because someone insulted him for being stupid enough to touch the stove in the first place. The right course of action remains the right course of action, regardless of what your enemies believe.
This is why people with ID's above 100k shouldn't be allowed to post on Slashdot.
Dozens of countries have very bad terrorist problems. Ours happens to be with Arabs, because of our extensive intervention in Arab areas over the last several decades. Until very recently, Britain's was Irish (because of their extensive intervention over the last several centuries), while Spain's was Basque. In Latin America the terrorist problem tends to be native, as the result of political conflicts in the turmoiled histories of Latin American countries. Then of course the terrorists in south-east and south Asia tend to be either Indian or Indonesian in ethnicity, and thus not Arab, though they are Muslim. Then of course we can't forget terrorists in China, which are often natives acting against the government, or nationalists from various regions within the country.
So why don't you go profile all of these various terrorist groups (which are all still operating, btw, even though you never hear about it in American media), and then get back to me about the "aren't that many non-arab terrorists" bullshit.
I don't mean money launderers have tenuous connections to organized crime. I mean the act of money laundering is one that is part of the list of illegal activities carried out by organized crime outfits.
The large-scale, international money-laundering operations that exist do so to fund organized crime. Much work in the financial sector deals with trying to detect these money-laundering transactions through the international financial grid. That's why money laundering is one of the four-horsemen. It's not referring to small-scale laundering carried out by white-collar criminals, but the large-scale laundering that fuels criminal organizations.
The launch stock is going to be much larger than the regular day-to-day stock, especially considering the PSP wasn't really in "shortage" mode at launch. Based on your numbers, it'd seem the maximum day-to-day stock is going to be somewhat less than 1m, which is not a difference I'd consider important in the big picture. 20m vs 22m or 19m vs 22m represents much the same thing --- a narrow lead for the DS, despite the massive hype it has on the internet.
I used KDE for years, and while the power was nice, and the code was clean, the UI sucked. I'd spend days getting rid of all the brain-damage in the UI (20-line context menus, 3-toolbar windows, etc), and eventually just gave up and switched to GNOME.
The KDE interface needs to be burned, and redone by someone sane.
Re:But does it have a useable file-save dialogue?
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I think its because Windows people don't even try to use OS X, wheras some Windows people try GNOME, and hit the "OMG, it behaves differently from Windows!" problem.
I use GNOME and OS X, and honestly I can't see what all the fuss is about. GNOME bears a non-trivial resemblance to OS X, and moving back and forth between the two is pretty easy.
Re:But does it have a useable file-save dialogue?
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GNOME 2.16 Released
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If you're advanced enough to deal with raw pathnames, you're advanced enough to lookup the shortcut keys.
Yes, you can't launch/copy-paste files from within OPEN and SAVE dialogs.
You can't do that in OS X either. It's not a design oversight, but rather a conscious design decision as to what the OPEN and SAVE dialogs should do. The GNOME and OS X folks decided that they should just open or save (duh), not be some mini file-browser.
On the other hand, KDE still has the massive overhaul and HIGification of its UI layout to do for version 4.0 (which GNOME did for 2.0). The two projects concentrated on different things. KDE has more features, but its UI layout is ass. GNOME's UI layout is good, but its now working on adding features.
For instance "all text should be accessible". In other words whereever I can see some text in GNOME I should be able to copy & paste that text (using the standard selection methods and Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-Ins, Shift-Ins, menu items etc. etc.)
Nobody does this. Its potentially useful (for something like copying song titles out of itunes), but also messes with some fundamental things about the user interface. If all text is selectable, then all widgets containing text (ie: all of them), should display the I-bar, rather than the pointer, on rollover. That destroys the basic metaphor of "pointing" to things to select them.
Any application that displays a list of files should allow me to double click on a file (or press "carriage return" or enter) and launch the default application associated with that file. Any application whatsoever.
Uh, no. The save dialog definitely shouldn't allow you to open or manage files. OS X does it the same way as GNOME, and its The Right Way (TM). The open dialog is a read-only operation (you can't change anything with it), the save dialog is a write-only operation, and the Finder/Nautilus is there for modifying the directory structure.
On another note then for gods sake stop messing around with the right click menus. Using Nautilus you can select "paste" from the "edit" menu. But you can't right click in the file area and select "edit" > "paste" as doing so selects the nearest file to the cursor and removes ("greys out") the paste option.
Which is as it should be. Edit -> Paste is a global menu action, and should not thus be in the context-specific-menu (which is what the right-click menu is for). The only things that should go in the right-click menu are the actions directly applicable to the object that was right-clicked.
Personalised, "intelligent" menus are simply crap. Look at Microsoft Office or XP hiding things away etc. If there's data on the clipboard that can be processed by the application then paste should be available. Hiding the option is simply dumb. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.
It's not a personalized menu. It's a context-sensitive menu. Personalized menus change seemingly arbitrarily. Context menus are always the save for a given object.
GNOME is designed according to a set of HIG principles. It's actually very rigorous in its application of them. Those HIG principles are fairly foreign to Windows users, since they are partially rooted in the classic MacOS HIG, and its not like Windows strictly follows an HIG anyway. The fact that they don't mesh with your Windows-programmed instincts doesn't make them bad, it just means you have to understand how it works, or just use Windows if you can't.
I own a DS Lite and a PSP. The DS Lite is okay, but I basically only bought it for the new FF game that's coming out. I haven't found it nearly as fun as my PSP, and the lack of texture filtering and lack of an analog stick is driving me up the wall. Mario 64 is a shadow of its former self without those two features.
However, that's a point sample. It proves nothing. The only thing that's useful is sales figures, and they show Nintendo with a relatively marginal lead.
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Most people in the developing world don't have families that are an airplane ride away.
You do realize that India is a good half the size of the US, don't you? A kid who comes from southern India to attend a good school in Dehli or Calcutta may easily live a thousand miles away from his family. India isn't like the United States, where there is relative prosperity all around. What prosperity exists is concentrated in a few population centers,
Most immigrants who come over to America are working for the purpose of bringing their family over to join them, so they can settle down and live a secure life in America.
The immigration system in the United States is not one that is set up for keeping extended families together (nor should it be, necessarily). Getting in by yourself, say to attend university and join the workforce, is relatively easy. Getting in with your wife and kids is more difficult, but doable. Getting in with your extended family is pretty much impossible. The only circumstances under which that generally happens is if multiple related families immigrate independently (ie: a guy and his brother both have jobs lined up, and and both bring their wives and kids).
Most immigrant families in the United States, at least legal immigrant families, are cut-off from their extended families. Their parents, grandparents, cousins, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, etc, remain in their country of origin. Due to the high cost of travelling back and forth, as well as the difficulty of getting Visas for extended family members, this isolation is a fairly complete one.
The vast majority of Americans can swing the cost of round-trip tickets between most points in the US to visit their family for Christmas, if this is something they care about. It might not work for a guy working at McDonalds with a family and two kids (if he makes $20k a year, that puts him in the bottom 20% of Americans), but its certainly true for a 50-percentile family making 45k a year.
I forgot to finish the first paragraph. The overhead savings is actually what makes this more attractive then you'd think, because its the same for both types of workers. If you have a guy making $75k in the US, he's costing you about $150k. In India, you could pay him $50k, with maybe another $10k in overhead. That's a total savings of $90k. Or, you could pay a local Indian worker $20k, with an overhead of $10k. Plus, you might incur $10k-$20k in training costs to get this worker up to par. If its a two-year job, we're looking at a savings of $110k for the Indian worker. That $20k difference is probably not enough to get you to take the risk of hiring the Indian worker. The savings from the reduced overhead was so substantial, that the extra savings from a lower salary are much less attractive, given the extra time, risk, and training involved.
Now of course, this isn't really applicable when the job in question is cookie-cutter and there is not a lot of extra training and risk is involved. Such is the risk of working cookie-cutter jobs. That doesn't mean that reverse outsourcing is bogus, however, because it happens all the time. There are tons of Americans at Intel India, for example, for precisely the reasons I outlined.
See your weak link here is believing that corporations care about the quality of life of their staff. Also, keep in mind that they can employ an Indian to do the same job for $10k a year. Why would they waste money on sending an American? Couple this with your savings on overhead, and you can see why reverse outsourcing is ludicrous.
Most successful corporations do care about the quality of life of their staff. Happy workers are much more productive workers. There are examples of ones that don't, but its a leap to make that a blanket epiteth to the entire industry. As for why they might send an American instead of employing an India, the answer is skills. Unless the job is something simple like making widgets or low-level IT, it might be very difficult to find a qualified Indian who can do the same job as an American already in the company's employment. The overhead savings is actually a large part of what makes this more attractive than you'd think.
Ah but that's project control and coordination positions. Thats not reverse outsourcing, thats management. Outsourcing is where you find people who do the same job in other countries on the cheap; what you are talking about is putting in a few people to control all of these new employees.
These projects don't usually break up well into the traditional "management/managed" metaphor. Usually, the actual work of the project is the planning, coordination, logistics, technical support, etc. The workers being coordinated are not usually employees of the company. In healthcare development, for example, they may be doctors and nurses already in the employment of local hospitals.
That's the biggest crock of shit I've read in a long time. Regardless of which country you live in, being in touch with your family is part of what is considered a basic necessity of life.
Yes, and those in the developing world give up that necessity every day. Americans can afford to visit family an airplane ride away on a regular basis. Much of the world can't. Americans almost never face the prospect of having to sever ties with their extended family, just to make a better life for their children. However, that is a sacrifice that millions of immigrants make every year. Americans live in a world in which they have cousins and grandparents and nieces and nephews. Almost every immigrant family lives in a world where there is only the parents and the children, and nobody else.
An American who was born here and whose family was born here leads a blessed life. They face only a fraction of the hardships faced by those elsewhere, and get much more out of life without working nearly as hard. He lives comfortably not because he works the hardest, or because his parents worked the hardest (hard work is life in a rice paddy!) but because he was just damn lucky enough to be born in the United States. Of course, there is no reason he should feel bad about it, luck is after all just dumb luck, but he should realize the nature of his situation. That his place in the world is not the result his inherent worthiness, but just the result of luck. And as the world changes, there is no inherent reason that he should maintain his place in it, no entitlement he can claim to the maintainance of his lifestyle.
No, globalization is the result of greedy bastard corporate pricks who don't have to worry about moving to fucking Bombay in order to keep their jobs.
Globalization is a natural economic force, like supply-and-demand. The "greedy bastard corporate prick", is no more in control of it than a farmer is in control of how he prices his vegetables. He has an illusion of control, in that he's making a decision, but in practice, globalization is the only decision. He can choose a different path, just as a farmer can choose to price his goods at higher than market price, but the market will then just make him irrelevent, favoring those who chose the path the market demands. Even if the United States as a country choses to oppose globalization, the market will make us irrelevent, favoring Europe or Japan instead.
The confluence of the two things leads to a simple, and inevitable, result. As barriers to communication and trade break down around the world markets, both for goods and labor, will become internationalized. As a result, the privleged life Americans enjoy can only be maintained through performance. You want to live a better life than the guy slaving away in a rice paddy? You can no longer do that just by virtue of being American. You have to leverage your skill, intelligence, capital, and hard work to make that be the case.
Yes, disease is a consideration, and it first it can be quite bad. My brother was born in the US, and when he visits Bangladesh, he takes sponge-baths with bottled water, because if he took a shower, he could get sick absorbing pathogens through the skin taking a shower in the local water. However, people who live there for some length of time will develop an immunity. Americans I know who work there regularly rarely get sick, because their bodies are used to the local conditions.
STDs and TB you won't build immunity to, of course, but those are largely non-issues. TB is something that's largely the result of environmental factors, and westerners just won't be subjected to the kind of environment that fosters TB. And of course, westerners won't be having sex with random women, as the cultural barriers to promiscuity in the upper classes are still quite strong.
It's still much cheaper. You can pay an American in India $50K per year, and he can live the way he would in the US for $150K per year. Also, the cost of all the overhead (a rule of thumb is that the total cost of a worker is 2x is salary), is also a lot lower over there.
More generally, it's something that some Americans have been doing for a long time. Anybody who works in foreign development knows somebody who has taken a posting in a developing nation, because it allows them to save a huge amount of their salary.
His point is that the comfortable lives we lead as Americans, including our ability to be constantly in touch with friends and family, is one that we live by virtue of us being Americans, not by virtue of our hard work, etc. What globalization means is the breaking down of that "caste". You don't get to live comfortably just because you're an American. In a way, this sounds egalatarian, but at the same time, its really not what Americans want. We don't want fairness, we don't want equality of opportunity, we want to live more comfortably just through the sheer virtue of being American.
Indians have a take-life-as-it-comes attitude that spills over into every aspect of their life. Urgency, precision, and planning are not familiar concepts to the Indian unstructured lifestyle.
Yes! This will drive many Americans nutty, particularly those from uptight parts of the country (eg: northeast). For those who haven't experienced it: imagine the American South, except worse.
Something as simple as a FIFO line, whether it be at a grocery store or a red light, is not implemented in India. Indians don't stand in line; they cluster. Also, driving in India is something that has to be experienced to be believed!
Yep to that too. Then don't forget the hoking! Whenver your driving in any level of traffic in an Indian city, car horns are going off constantly. In the US, you can go weeks without hearing a car horn.
The infrastructure isn't as bad as Americans might think, and its not as gooda s the Indians want you to believe.
From first-hand experience, I can tell you that on a middle class US salary, you can live like a rich man in India. The western standard of living, with not just indoor plumbing, but central air, a luxurious house, satillite or cable TV, will all be present and accounted for. If you live in a major Indian city, the electricity will be highly reliable as well. You'll also get some perks middle-class westerners are not used to, namely a personal cook, maid, nanny, and often driver. This will be your standard of living at home, and at work, and often at the shopping areas and restaurants other well-to-do Indians frequent.
Now, the bad stuff. Your power will go out more often than here in the states, with how much more often depending on the exact area. Worse of all, as soon as you leave the comfortable world of the upper-classes, which will happen unless you shut yourself in, you'll have to deal with the masses of India's urban poor. Most Americans would not be comfortable wandering around anything but the posh areas of an Indian city. The filth, the poverty, the sheer number of beggers, the traffic, the pollution, etc, are something that are totally alien to all but America's hardened inner-city residents. Then there is the climate --- much of India is tropical, and if you're from a temperate part of the US, the heat and humidity will kill you. Imagine the hottest, most humid day in Georgia or Florida, summer torrential-downpours and all, except 10 degrees hotter, and with more frequent torrential downpours. Last but not least is the pervasive corruption. India is a lot better in this regard than some of its surrounding countries (Pakistan and Bangladesh), but the level of corruption is still something alien to Americans. For as much as Americans bitch about corruption, day-to-day corruption among the rank-and-file beauracracy in the United States is almost non-existant. Living in India, you WILL eventually have to pay a bribe to someone, whether it is to get your phone connected, pay a parking ticket, whatever.
I understand the US-centricity, but what bugs me is that people fail to realize the greater nature of terrorism. Terrorism is just more than something Middle Easterners do to Americans. Its a method of warfare that's been around for a tremendously long time, and has exhibited itself in many different situations. Failing to understand that is failing to understand the basic threat that we as Americans face.
I think it just confirms what we all knew. At least 99% of Facebook users are idiots, and the other 1% are there because some of the 99% made them...
The "they want to kill or convert us" bullshit is wearing thin. A movement of this size cannot be sustained just through sheer religious zealotry. It would be historically unprecedented, and if there is one thing that is sure, is that there is nothing new under the Sun.
Your sort of attitude is one that does not lend itself to understanding the problem. If you can't understand the problem, you can't solve the problem. You're just like a medieval "doctor", whose only solution to an infection is cut off the offending appendage, and hope the infection doesn't spread elsewhere. Indeed, its an attitude that does not lend itself to solving the problem at all. The only recourse your thinking allows is "fight the terrorists", which isn't a solution. You can't possibly kill them all, so you've basically surrendered to a lifetime of perpetual war. Your proposition is a losing one.
The use of the word "appeasement" is also fairly entertaining. Americans tend to look at all events through the historical perspective of WWII, probably because its the one tiny bit of history they know. Well, there is a lot more history in existence, and that history gives us a lot of insight into our present problem, which, despite what the ignorant believe, is not one without historical precedent. Trying to actually solve the problem, instead of just fighting it out and hoping that the basic facts of nature change themselves, is not "appeasement". The problem here is that we're intervening in the affairs of the Middle East. We're propping up regimes that the people of the Middle East don't want there, and we're supporting a minority nation that is throughly antagonistic to all of its neighbors. We're basically fucking with the Middle East, and now we're pissed that they're fucking back. It makes no sense to be pissed --- its a law of nature. You fuck with somebody, they'll fuck you back. We're better of expecting gravity to change than expecting human nature to change. The solution is to stop fucking with the Middle East, and we should not avoid doing it just because that's what the terrorists want. Otherwise, we're like a man who keeps his hand on a hot stove, because someone insulted him for being stupid enough to touch the stove in the first place. The right course of action remains the right course of action, regardless of what your enemies believe.
This is why people with ID's above 100k shouldn't be allowed to post on Slashdot.
Dozens of countries have very bad terrorist problems. Ours happens to be with Arabs, because of our extensive intervention in Arab areas over the last several decades. Until very recently, Britain's was Irish (because of their extensive intervention over the last several centuries), while Spain's was Basque. In Latin America the terrorist problem tends to be native, as the result of political conflicts in the turmoiled histories of Latin American countries. Then of course the terrorists in south-east and south Asia tend to be either Indian or Indonesian in ethnicity, and thus not Arab, though they are Muslim. Then of course we can't forget terrorists in China, which are often natives acting against the government, or nationalists from various regions within the country.
So why don't you go profile all of these various terrorist groups (which are all still operating, btw, even though you never hear about it in American media), and then get back to me about the "aren't that many non-arab terrorists" bullshit.
You didn't specify gender...
I don't mean money launderers have tenuous connections to organized crime. I mean the act of money laundering is one that is part of the list of illegal activities carried out by organized crime outfits.
The large-scale, international money-laundering operations that exist do so to fund organized crime. Much work in the financial sector deals with trying to detect these money-laundering transactions through the international financial grid. That's why money laundering is one of the four-horsemen. It's not referring to small-scale laundering carried out by white-collar criminals, but the large-scale laundering that fuels criminal organizations.
The launch stock is going to be much larger than the regular day-to-day stock, especially considering the PSP wasn't really in "shortage" mode at launch. Based on your numbers, it'd seem the maximum day-to-day stock is going to be somewhat less than 1m, which is not a difference I'd consider important in the big picture. 20m vs 22m or 19m vs 22m represents much the same thing --- a narrow lead for the DS, despite the massive hype it has on the internet.
Money laundering is associated with organized crime.
I used KDE for years, and while the power was nice, and the code was clean, the UI sucked. I'd spend days getting rid of all the brain-damage in the UI (20-line context menus, 3-toolbar windows, etc), and eventually just gave up and switched to GNOME.
The KDE interface needs to be burned, and redone by someone sane.
I think its because Windows people don't even try to use OS X, wheras some Windows people try GNOME, and hit the "OMG, it behaves differently from Windows!" problem.
I use GNOME and OS X, and honestly I can't see what all the fuss is about. GNOME bears a non-trivial resemblance to OS X, and moving back and forth between the two is pretty easy.
If you're advanced enough to deal with raw pathnames, you're advanced enough to lookup the shortcut keys.
Yes, you can't launch/copy-paste files from within OPEN and SAVE dialogs.
You can't do that in OS X either. It's not a design oversight, but rather a conscious design decision as to what the OPEN and SAVE dialogs should do. The GNOME and OS X folks decided that they should just open or save (duh), not be some mini file-browser.
On the other hand, KDE still has the massive overhaul and HIGification of its UI layout to do for version 4.0 (which GNOME did for 2.0). The two projects concentrated on different things. KDE has more features, but its UI layout is ass. GNOME's UI layout is good, but its now working on adding features.
For instance "all text should be accessible". In other words whereever I can see some text in GNOME I should be able to copy & paste that text (using the standard selection methods and Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-Ins, Shift-Ins, menu items etc. etc.)
Nobody does this. Its potentially useful (for something like copying song titles out of itunes), but also messes with some fundamental things about the user interface. If all text is selectable, then all widgets containing text (ie: all of them), should display the I-bar, rather than the pointer, on rollover. That destroys the basic metaphor of "pointing" to things to select them.
Any application that displays a list of files should allow me to double click on a file (or press "carriage return" or enter) and launch the default application associated with that file. Any application whatsoever.
Uh, no. The save dialog definitely shouldn't allow you to open or manage files. OS X does it the same way as GNOME, and its The Right Way (TM). The open dialog is a read-only operation (you can't change anything with it), the save dialog is a write-only operation, and the Finder/Nautilus is there for modifying the directory structure.
On another note then for gods sake stop messing around with the right click menus. Using Nautilus you can select "paste" from the "edit" menu. But you can't right click in the file area and select "edit" > "paste" as doing so selects the nearest file to the cursor and removes ("greys out") the paste option.
Which is as it should be. Edit -> Paste is a global menu action, and should not thus be in the context-specific-menu (which is what the right-click menu is for). The only things that should go in the right-click menu are the actions directly applicable to the object that was right-clicked.
Personalised, "intelligent" menus are simply crap. Look at Microsoft Office or XP hiding things away etc. If there's data on the clipboard that can be processed by the application then paste should be available. Hiding the option is simply dumb. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.
It's not a personalized menu. It's a context-sensitive menu. Personalized menus change seemingly arbitrarily. Context menus are always the save for a given object.
GNOME is designed according to a set of HIG principles. It's actually very rigorous in its application of them. Those HIG principles are fairly foreign to Windows users, since they are partially rooted in the classic MacOS HIG, and its not like Windows strictly follows an HIG anyway. The fact that they don't mesh with your Windows-programmed instincts doesn't make them bad, it just means you have to understand how it works, or just use Windows if you can't.
And that's a representative sample, because?
I own a DS Lite and a PSP. The DS Lite is okay, but I basically only bought it for the new FF game that's coming out. I haven't found it nearly as fun as my PSP, and the lack of texture filtering and lack of an analog stick is driving me up the wall. Mario 64 is a shadow of its former self without those two features.
However, that's a point sample. It proves nothing. The only thing that's useful is sales figures, and they show Nintendo with a relatively marginal lead.