But there *is* such a thing as too illiterate to use one's own native language properly.
You, sir, probably wanted to use the adverb "too" which conveys the meaning of "to an excessive extent or degree" and the plural (capitalized, since it's a proper noun) Indians as opposed to the incorrectly spelled possessive "indian's".
As parent says, the article is utterly wrong. There are no per-country caps on H1B. The caps are on Green Cards (permanent residence) issued under certain categories, EB2 (Employment Based 2nd) being the most affected.
The problem is that all countries, irrespective of their population, get a fixed ceiling of 7% of the total allocation of 140000 GCs issued per year. So, H1B workers from China and India have to wait at least 5 years, sometimes 10 years depending on the whims of USCIS, to get their Green Card. During that time, they have to continue being employed by the same company that originally filed the GC application, and in a materially similar position as at the time of filing. A major change in job description requires refiling. If you don't realize what that means, it makes those workers subservient to their employers. This has quite the opposite effect that you think it does - it doesn't help US workers any since these foreigners are already employed, but it gives the employers a position of power from which they can dictate terms on pay raises and promotions since they have the workers by the leash.
This is definitely hurting US tech companies because many excellent techies getting good salaries are leaving the US and setting up their own companies either in their home countries or in some other immigration-friendly country, Canada and Singapore being the top destinations. They would rather spend 2 years setting up their own company and getting permanent residence and a path to citizenship there than toil for 6+ years in fear with no certain timeline on when they'll become a permanent resident, much less a citizen of the US.
I myself am an example of a person who left the US after being there for 11 years. I was on H1B and making $120k/yr, so definitely not an underpaid worker. But I'm loathe to serve 6 years in a big corporation doing the same job day in and day out. So, I moved back to India, and I'm using my contacts in the industry to provide embedded software and hardware development services to small companies in the US. At the same time, I'm providing Industrial Automation consulting services to Indian companies and am currently working on a new data logging product for the South African market. So, the US lost the tax revenue it would have received. It lost a bunch of local jobs due to US companies outsourcing work to me in India. And it lost the new jobs I'd have created there if I'd continued building new products in the US.
So, you decide what works in US's national interests? Keeping people like me away from that country, or giving us an incentive to set up companies of our own?
And if you claim that I'm a minority, that's an irrelevant argument. A very useful minority is still being alienated. I loved being in the US, and would happily go back if the immigration situation becomes easier and more deterministic. But I seriously don't see current US politics being conducive to ANYTHING that's of real value to the country.
Dish is going all out in taking on Directv. They recognize Directv is stronger than them, so they are value-adding to their core satellite programming. They introduced Blockbuster Streaming and Tailgater (http://www.dishnetwork.com/redirects/promotion/tailgater/default.aspx) at their 'Team Summit' in May. Both of them are essentially add-ons, but are meant to offer the oomph to sign on new customers or migrate existing satellite customers from Directv. Dish doesn't have that much of an incentive to sell either of those products to non-Dish customers.
[Full disclosure: My company makes the Tailgater and the product is my design]
Sorry sir, but upper castes can also be beaten, murdered, extorted, systematically denied legal representation, et al. What matters is how well-connected you are. And that factor is as important pretty much anywhere in the world. Take the example of blacks and hispanics in the US, Uighurs and Tibetans in China, Romas in Europe, ethnic Africans (as opposed to ethnic Arabs) in Sudan, etc etc. I'm from a part of India where upper castes lived in fear of 'lower' castes for close to 15 years until 4 years ago when a change of government equalized power and brought back balance. Now, that province (Bihar) is making international headlines with fastest economic growth in India.
Yours seems to be an intentionally under-informed opinion based on xenophobia. Most people around the world are good. Most people in positions of power are not. Do not treat one as the other.
This technology is only a subset of the prosthetic arm - 'Luke' - developed by Dean Kamen's company. The prosthetic arm is controlled directly by the user's brain as well and allows a lot more complexity compared to the hand shown here. Also, Luke is being built as a modular system where you only use the parts of the arm that you need - if you don't need the upper arm, you can use just the hand and lower arm, and so forth.
More details below:
That's the FUD propaganda. The more balanced perspective is it's the seeing stone anyone could use to see their future. But it was put to evil purposes instead by Sauron.
Technology by itself is not good or evil. It's how one uses it that makes it so. Remember that the Internet came out of a doom-and-gloom project to create a nuclear-war resistant communication network.
I don't completely agree with the observation. Yes, most people don't know about the 'runas' command, and I wouldn't have known either if I hadn't worked on the XP team. But I have been diligently using an unprivileged account on all my XP machines for regular work since 2001. If you right click on an executable, you can select 'Run As' and then choose which user you want to run the binary as. This doesn't work with.msi packages directly, so you need to start a command prompt and start the msi package from there. I still use these techniques without much problem.
But, as one of the replies to parent noted, many applications themselves are broken, and won't run as a non-admin user. One of the biggest offenders is Microsoft's own Windows Media Player. DRM schemes break down if you are not running as an admin user! Many graphics-intensive apps screw up for whatever reasons (I'm not very familiar with DirectX, but that seems to be the culprit there). Further, I know for a fact that most developers in MS stay logged in as admin, so most code doesn't get developed with a Unix-like user credentials model anyway. I don't know if that has changed in MS with Vista being the standard desktop OS there, but I highly doubt it.
One more particular thing MS did horribly wrong with Vista is ask the user for confirmation every time it blinks. It is a well understood by UI experts that such 'confirmations' are read only the first time - after that, saying 'yes' becomes a habit. 'sudo' is definitely a lot more mature (but still somewhat lacking) in that arena since it caches the state for some time.
The fact remains though, that MS tried something radically different and failed miserably with Vista. Probably proves the point that large corporations should stick to manufacturing, selling and incremental updates and leave innovation to smaller startups.
Maybe MS should buy out the Haiku dev team and have them build a new OS that is binary compatible with older MS platforms, but is better than their Windows code base.
If you know only one language, you are either fresh out of a get-a-job-quick diploma school or high school. You better be. If you are in the industry and you know only one language, you are already obsolete! They just haven't gotten around to handing you the pink slip yet. Just knowing Java, e.g, won't get you anywhere unless you know some PHP as well as far as web programming goes. Just knowing C# is not enough - very often, you have to deal with lingering COM code most probably written in VB6 (uggghh) or C++. Or you might need to write an unmanaged DLL in plain C.
Fresh-out-of-school kids take note. If you know only one language, learn another one, preferably one very different from the one you know. It will give you one extra bullet point on your resume, but much more importantly, it will give you a new perspective to programming solutions to problems.
This is a common misconception that Braille is the easiest form of presentation for the visually impaired. But that is not so.
Mind you, I use the word 'visually impaired', and not 'blind' for a good reason. A large proportion of the people considered legally blind do have some vision - they fall into the category called 'Low Vision'. There are about 2 million people in the US at present who have Low Vision, but number will swell significantly as the baby boomers age into 50+. Most visual impairments are actually age related, and when you've had vision till age 55 and you suddenly lose it in 6 months, it's a very disturbing experience. Most people who undergo that experience either do not have the ability to or don't care about learning tactile braille at that stage. Even as of now, only a fraction of the visually impaired population can actually read braille.
Also, as the other poster mentions, braille devices are extremely expensive, require a lot of power and are bulky (both in size and weight). A braille display with 40 braille cells will cost an additional $2500.
All that said, I should also mention that building a purely verbal user interface for 'describing' things is a very challenging task. I've been working the last 2 years on a similar device but purely for addressing navigation issues for the visually impaired. We already have a prototype device that can read special barcodes at a distance of about 6 feet, and then that barcode can be looked up in a database to determine the user's location. But how to describe their current location in a manner relevant to their task is proving to be a very tricky problem to solve. Every few months, we feel that we are very close and then discover one more issue that sets us back another few months.
So, it's encouraging to see that someone has been successfully able to build a verbal only interface for descriptive tasks.
- Rudrava Roy
Minnesota Laboratory for Low Vision Research
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
It is very easy to point at a problem. It is often very difficult to suggest a solution. Yes, clean drinking water, toilets (mind you, I said toilets, not 'clean' toilets - that'd be the next phase!), electricity, transport, assured employment are the issues that need to be tackled more or less in that order in India. But as it often happens with difficult problems, the solution lies at an altogether different level. A couple of NGOs can probably pool up enough money to ferry water in tankers to some remote villages - but that model is not sustainable.
The issue then is not to provide a patch, but to root out the problem itself. And that makes you think deeply about the problem itself. The real problem isn't actually lack of the resources but utter mismanagement of them. Water is available everywhere in India (you'd have to agree to that cuz people aren't dying in huge numbers - and you know that water is essential to survival!), but the distribution channels are horrible and people aren't aware of how to use it optimally.
India's 2 core problems are (in order) population and corruption. In fact, the 2 feed each other. As population grows explosively, resources become scarcer, and as a result, those who control the resources become more corrupt. Literacy/education fits right in the barrier between the 2 problems. If the electorate was literate and aware enough to elect good, honest representatives into positions of power (i.e., the ones that control the resources), a negative feedback cycle will ensue and the system will stabilize. Unfortunately, education itself has always been a scarce resource in India. Hence the people in power have a vested interest in keeping the resource scarce so as to manipulate the electorate.
If you remember Renaissance in Europe, you'd remember that the middle class played the biggest role in the overhaul. This will have to be true in India as well if the alternative of complete destruction followed by rebuilding is to be avoided. The middle class is literate enough at present - but they aren't aware enough and they aren't large enough in numbers. When the middle classes reach critical mass, they will be in a position to bring about true change.
The way the middle class grows is through the infusion of more money into the economy such that it truly trickles down to the bottom. As the Indian economy grows, more of the poor will graduate into the middle class. And simply by the law of large numbers, there will end up being some of the 'newly educated' who turn out to be intellectuals and leaders. It's only when a new breed of intellectual leaders crops up in India will there be any true change there.
The point where my analysis ties in with the article above is the economy. Space is a huge revenue generator. Space tourism is inevitable within a decade or 2. Given that only about 10 countries in the world have the technology to handle that, there is a lot of money in it for them. India has a lot of very talented scientists - heck, the President himself is literally a Rocket Scientist! The 2 areas where real research is being done in India are space science and missile technology (go figure!). India needs to leverage that advantage to jump into the space tourism industry. So, it is great to hear that progress is really being made towards that.
As far as I know, the arctic permafrost is already melting - which implies that the seeds will not remain frozen for very long.
And I'd suppose there would be flooding issues involved where there is a lot of melting water. So, they will probably succeed in creating an underwater chamber of moldy grains then?
India (Bangladesh)???
India and Bangladesh are 2 separate sovereign countries. India hasn't quite annexed Bangladesh (yet!) and I don't think they want to either:)
The authorities in question had the gall to offer a compromise that included:
15 hours of community service, a letter of apology, a class on personal responsibility, and a few months of probation.
A letter of apology? That I'm sighted, not dumb, and would like to use convenient technology to stay in touch with my friends?
And what is this from one of the defendant attorneys:
Mike Boland, who represents one student, said his client likely will accept the offer. "It doesn't require my client to acknowledge he is guilty of anything," he said.
I'd say a letter of apology counts as acknowledging guilt, at least in my books!
If you keep track of Paul Graham's essays (try http://store.yahoo.com/paulgraham/nerds.html), you will probably recognize this as a glowing example of the holding pen analogy he uses vis-a-vis present day school system. I'm apalled that the most important thing that these bright kids are impressioned with is 'Obey the Thought Police'!
Slashdot Mirror
You, sir, probably wanted to use the adverb "too" which conveys the meaning of "to an excessive extent or degree" and the plural (capitalized, since it's a proper noun) Indians as opposed to the incorrectly spelled possessive "indian's".
Yes, I'm Indian, thank you.
This is definitely hurting US tech companies because many excellent techies getting good salaries are leaving the US and setting up their own companies either in their home countries or in some other immigration-friendly country, Canada and Singapore being the top destinations. They would rather spend 2 years setting up their own company and getting permanent residence and a path to citizenship there than toil for 6+ years in fear with no certain timeline on when they'll become a permanent resident, much less a citizen of the US.
I myself am an example of a person who left the US after being there for 11 years. I was on H1B and making $120k/yr, so definitely not an underpaid worker. But I'm loathe to serve 6 years in a big corporation doing the same job day in and day out. So, I moved back to India, and I'm using my contacts in the industry to provide embedded software and hardware development services to small companies in the US. At the same time, I'm providing Industrial Automation consulting services to Indian companies and am currently working on a new data logging product for the South African market. So, the US lost the tax revenue it would have received. It lost a bunch of local jobs due to US companies outsourcing work to me in India. And it lost the new jobs I'd have created there if I'd continued building new products in the US.
So, you decide what works in US's national interests? Keeping people like me away from that country, or giving us an incentive to set up companies of our own? And if you claim that I'm a minority, that's an irrelevant argument. A very useful minority is still being alienated. I loved being in the US, and would happily go back if the immigration situation becomes easier and more deterministic. But I seriously don't see current US politics being conducive to ANYTHING that's of real value to the country.
Dish is going all out in taking on Directv. They recognize Directv is stronger than them, so they are value-adding to their core satellite programming. They introduced Blockbuster Streaming and Tailgater (http://www.dishnetwork.com/redirects/promotion/tailgater/default.aspx) at their 'Team Summit' in May. Both of them are essentially add-ons, but are meant to offer the oomph to sign on new customers or migrate existing satellite customers from Directv. Dish doesn't have that much of an incentive to sell either of those products to non-Dish customers. [Full disclosure: My company makes the Tailgater and the product is my design]
Sorry sir, but upper castes can also be beaten, murdered, extorted, systematically denied legal representation, et al. What matters is how well-connected you are. And that factor is as important pretty much anywhere in the world. Take the example of blacks and hispanics in the US, Uighurs and Tibetans in China, Romas in Europe, ethnic Africans (as opposed to ethnic Arabs) in Sudan, etc etc. I'm from a part of India where upper castes lived in fear of 'lower' castes for close to 15 years until 4 years ago when a change of government equalized power and brought back balance. Now, that province (Bihar) is making international headlines with fastest economic growth in India. Yours seems to be an intentionally under-informed opinion based on xenophobia. Most people around the world are good. Most people in positions of power are not. Do not treat one as the other.
This technology is only a subset of the prosthetic arm - 'Luke' - developed by Dean Kamen's company. The prosthetic arm is controlled directly by the user's brain as well and allows a lot more complexity compared to the hand shown here. Also, Luke is being built as a modular system where you only use the parts of the arm that you need - if you don't need the upper arm, you can use just the hand and lower arm, and so forth.
More details below:
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2008/05/dean-kamens-rob/
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/bionics/dean-kamens-luke-arm-prosthesis-readies-for-clinical-trials/2
http://blog.ted.com/2008/02/dean_kamens_arm.php
PS: For those who can't place the name, Dean Kamen is the inventor of Segway, among other things.
That's the FUD propaganda. The more balanced perspective is it's the seeing stone anyone could use to see their future. But it was put to evil purposes instead by Sauron.
Technology by itself is not good or evil. It's how one uses it that makes it so. Remember that the Internet came out of a doom-and-gloom project to create a nuclear-war resistant communication network.
I don't completely agree with the observation. Yes, most people don't know about the 'runas' command, and I wouldn't have known either if I hadn't worked on the XP team. But I have been diligently using an unprivileged account on all my XP machines for regular work since 2001. If you right click on an executable, you can select 'Run As' and then choose which user you want to run the binary as. This doesn't work with .msi packages directly, so you need to start a command prompt and start the msi package from there. I still use these techniques without much problem.
But, as one of the replies to parent noted, many applications themselves are broken, and won't run as a non-admin user. One of the biggest offenders is Microsoft's own Windows Media Player. DRM schemes break down if you are not running as an admin user! Many graphics-intensive apps screw up for whatever reasons (I'm not very familiar with DirectX, but that seems to be the culprit there). Further, I know for a fact that most developers in MS stay logged in as admin, so most code doesn't get developed with a Unix-like user credentials model anyway. I don't know if that has changed in MS with Vista being the standard desktop OS there, but I highly doubt it.
One more particular thing MS did horribly wrong with Vista is ask the user for confirmation every time it blinks. It is a well understood by UI experts that such 'confirmations' are read only the first time - after that, saying 'yes' becomes a habit. 'sudo' is definitely a lot more mature (but still somewhat lacking) in that arena since it caches the state for some time.
The fact remains though, that MS tried something radically different and failed miserably with Vista. Probably proves the point that large corporations should stick to manufacturing, selling and incremental updates and leave innovation to smaller startups.
Maybe MS should buy out the Haiku dev team and have them build a new OS that is binary compatible with older MS platforms, but is better than their Windows code base.
Mod parent up!!! I haven't laughed so hard in ages! I wish I had this kind of wit.
If you know only one language, you are either fresh out of a get-a-job-quick diploma school or high school. You better be. If you are in the industry and you know only one language, you are already obsolete! They just haven't gotten around to handing you the pink slip yet. Just knowing Java, e.g, won't get you anywhere unless you know some PHP as well as far as web programming goes. Just knowing C# is not enough - very often, you have to deal with lingering COM code most probably written in VB6 (uggghh) or C++. Or you might need to write an unmanaged DLL in plain C.
Fresh-out-of-school kids take note. If you know only one language, learn another one, preferably one very different from the one you know. It will give you one extra bullet point on your resume, but much more importantly, it will give you a new perspective to programming solutions to problems.
.... Not ripe enough?
Sorry if that left a sour taste in your mouth!
Mind you, I use the word 'visually impaired', and not 'blind' for a good reason. A large proportion of the people considered legally blind do have some vision - they fall into the category called 'Low Vision'. There are about 2 million people in the US at present who have Low Vision, but number will swell significantly as the baby boomers age into 50+. Most visual impairments are actually age related, and when you've had vision till age 55 and you suddenly lose it in 6 months, it's a very disturbing experience. Most people who undergo that experience either do not have the ability to or don't care about learning tactile braille at that stage. Even as of now, only a fraction of the visually impaired population can actually read braille.
Also, as the other poster mentions, braille devices are extremely expensive, require a lot of power and are bulky (both in size and weight). A braille display with 40 braille cells will cost an additional $2500.
All that said, I should also mention that building a purely verbal user interface for 'describing' things is a very challenging task. I've been working the last 2 years on a similar device but purely for addressing navigation issues for the visually impaired. We already have a prototype device that can read special barcodes at a distance of about 6 feet, and then that barcode can be looked up in a database to determine the user's location. But how to describe their current location in a manner relevant to their task is proving to be a very tricky problem to solve. Every few months, we feel that we are very close and then discover one more issue that sets us back another few months.
So, it's encouraging to see that someone has been successfully able to build a verbal only interface for descriptive tasks.
- Rudrava Roy
Minnesota Laboratory for Low Vision Research
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
It is very easy to point at a problem. It is often very difficult to suggest a solution. Yes, clean drinking water, toilets (mind you, I said toilets, not 'clean' toilets - that'd be the next phase!), electricity, transport, assured employment are the issues that need to be tackled more or less in that order in India. But as it often happens with difficult problems, the solution lies at an altogether different level. A couple of NGOs can probably pool up enough money to ferry water in tankers to some remote villages - but that model is not sustainable.
The issue then is not to provide a patch, but to root out the problem itself. And that makes you think deeply about the problem itself. The real problem isn't actually lack of the resources but utter mismanagement of them. Water is available everywhere in India (you'd have to agree to that cuz people aren't dying in huge numbers - and you know that water is essential to survival!), but the distribution channels are horrible and people aren't aware of how to use it optimally.
India's 2 core problems are (in order) population and corruption. In fact, the 2 feed each other. As population grows explosively, resources become scarcer, and as a result, those who control the resources become more corrupt. Literacy/education fits right in the barrier between the 2 problems. If the electorate was literate and aware enough to elect good, honest representatives into positions of power (i.e., the ones that control the resources), a negative feedback cycle will ensue and the system will stabilize. Unfortunately, education itself has always been a scarce resource in India. Hence the people in power have a vested interest in keeping the resource scarce so as to manipulate the electorate.
If you remember Renaissance in Europe, you'd remember that the middle class played the biggest role in the overhaul. This will have to be true in India as well if the alternative of complete destruction followed by rebuilding is to be avoided. The middle class is literate enough at present - but they aren't aware enough and they aren't large enough in numbers. When the middle classes reach critical mass, they will be in a position to bring about true change.
The way the middle class grows is through the infusion of more money into the economy such that it truly trickles down to the bottom. As the Indian economy grows, more of the poor will graduate into the middle class. And simply by the law of large numbers, there will end up being some of the 'newly educated' who turn out to be intellectuals and leaders. It's only when a new breed of intellectual leaders crops up in India will there be any true change there.
The point where my analysis ties in with the article above is the economy. Space is a huge revenue generator. Space tourism is inevitable within a decade or 2. Given that only about 10 countries in the world have the technology to handle that, there is a lot of money in it for them. India has a lot of very talented scientists - heck, the President himself is literally a Rocket Scientist! The 2 areas where real research is being done in India are space science and missile technology (go figure!). India needs to leverage that advantage to jump into the space tourism industry. So, it is great to hear that progress is really being made towards that.
As far as I know, the arctic permafrost is already melting - which implies that the seeds will not remain frozen for very long.
And I'd suppose there would be flooding issues involved where there is a lot of melting water. So, they will probably succeed in creating an underwater chamber of moldy grains then?
India (Bangladesh)??? :)
India and Bangladesh are 2 separate sovereign countries. India hasn't quite annexed Bangladesh (yet!) and I don't think they want to either
The authorities in question had the gall to offer a compromise that included:
15 hours of community service, a letter of apology, a class on personal responsibility, and a few months of probation.
A letter of apology? That I'm sighted, not dumb, and would like to use convenient technology to stay in touch with my friends?
And what is this from one of the defendant attorneys:
Mike Boland, who represents one student, said his client likely will accept the offer. "It doesn't require my client to acknowledge he is guilty of anything," he said.
I'd say a letter of apology counts as acknowledging guilt, at least in my books!
If you keep track of Paul Graham's essays (try http://store.yahoo.com/paulgraham/nerds.html), you will probably recognize this as a glowing example of the holding pen analogy he uses vis-a-vis present day school system. I'm apalled that the most important thing that these bright kids are impressioned with is 'Obey the Thought Police'!