What about jobs which go the other way (coming to the US from, say, India?). This may sound surprising, but it has been happening for decades now. I have a personal story to tell about outsourcing from India to the US which caused the loss of my tech job in India. There were other people like me who were affected, but it all happened very quietly, and everyone (including me) assumed there was nothing wrong with it. Here it is:
When I left college (in India) with an EECS engineering degree in the early eighties, the computer industry in India was small but competely local. Tariffs and laws prevented the import of computers, and there were about 6-8 companies in India who designed, manufactured and sold computer systems. The way the laws worked, you could import components (chips, capacitors etc.), but not computers, so these companies were protected from imported computers.
I joined one of these companies and spent several years essentially living in heaven. We were doing leading-edge work and in the space of a few years, I designed several CPUs, I/O processors, graphics processors and OS-level code for things like zero-latency disk reads and inter-processor communications. Others at my company built compilers, database management systems and graphics libraries. This was all proprietary stuff, very expensive because of the cost of all the R&D people like me and the low volumes. But I was doing what I loved, doing it well, and having a blast. I didn't get paid much (All I could afford for several years was a bicycle until I managed to save enough money to buy a small motor--scooter), but I didn't care. I worked 16-hour days just to get my name on the next system that we rolled out.
Somewhere in the mid-80s, the Indian government decided that they shouldn't protect these companies, and everyone should be allowed to buy computers from wherever they want. I wasn't worried. I knew the systems I built were better, and I understood Indian customers much better than the American companies whose systems that were starting to come in. I remember looking at the early IBM PCs and some Unix boxes and feeling smug about how much better our systems were.,
You can probably guess the rest of the story. To my utter surprise, my company decided they don't want to have us design their systems any more. Because of their much larger volumes, the US systems cost less, and management calculated they could make more money by getting the basic systems from a US company and focusing on sales, support and custom application development. As a bonus, they got rid of all the wierd techies like me who never quite fitted the corporate culture (they didn't actually fire us, but asked us to move to support/sales, so I quit). The same thing was happening at all the other computer companies, so we didn't find design jobs anywhere else either.
There was no outcry, no political storm, but very quietly and peacefully, my design job had got outsourced to some designers in the US because the final result was cheaper. There's a long story about what happened next, but for the purposes of this post, the important thing was that I figured out there was no point in blaming the government or my management for what happened to me. All that happened was that something removed the protection I was working behind, and naturally my job went to someone who could do it better than I could. What else could happen? Asking for protection again was like trying to retreat into a fantasy cocoon (and nobody was listening, anyway:-).
What surprises me is that so many people in the US today think the current wave of outsourcing is different and try to make this into a moral issue. I can understand the dissapointment of losing a job you love (I've had it happen to me), but I don't see any fundamental difference between what America (and to some extent, Europe and Japan) have been doing in such a dominant way for so long (designing and manufacturing so many of the world's goods), and what is happening in a small way in I
I don't know about decimating jobs, but I do have a personal story to tell about outsourcing from India to the US which caused the loss of my techie job in India. There were other people like me who were affected, but it all happened very quietly, and everyone (including me) assumed there was nothing wrong with it. Here it is :
When I left college (in India) with an EECS engineering degree in the early eighties, the computer industry in India was small but competely local. Tariffs and laws prevented the import of computers, and there were about 6-8 companies in India who designed, manufactured and sold computer systems. The way the laws worked, you could import components (chips, capacitors etc.), but not computers, so these companies were protected from imported computers.
I joined one of these companies and spent several years essentially living in heaven. We were doing leading-edge work and in the space of a few years, I designed several CPUs, I/O processors, graphics processors and OS-level code for things like zero-latency disk reads and inter-processor communications. Others at my company built compilers, database management systems and graphics libraries. This was all proprietary stuff, very expensive because of the cost of all the R&D people like me and the low volumes. But I was doing what I loved, doing it well, and having a blast. I didn't get paid much (All I could afford for several years was a bicycle until I managed to save enough money to buy a small motor--scooter), but I didn't care. I worked 16-hour days just to get my name on the next system that we rolled out.
Somewhere in the mid-80s, the Indian government decided that they shouldn't protect these companies, and everyone should be allowed to buy computers from wherever they want. I wasn't worried. I knew the systems I built were better, and I understood Indian customers much better than the American companies whose systems that were starting to come in. I remember looking at the early IBM PCs and some Unix boxes and feeling smug about how much better our systems were.,
You can probably guess the rest of the story. To my utter surprise, my company decided they don't want to have us design their systems any more. Because of their much larger volumes, the US systems cost less, and management calculated they could make more money by getting the basic systems from a US company and focusing on sales, support and custom application development. As a bonus, they got rid of all the wierd techies like me who never quite fitted the corporate culture (they didn't actually fire us, but asked us to move to support/sales, so I quit). The same thing was happening at all the other computer companies, so we didn't find design jobs anywhere else either.
There was no outcry, no political storm, but very quietly and peacefully, my design job had got outsourced to some designers in the US because the final result was cheaper. There's a long story about what happened next, but for the purposes of this post, the important thing was that I figured out there was no point in blaming the government or my management for what happened to me. All that happened was that something removed the protection I was working behind, and naturally my job went to someone who could do it better than I could. What else could happen? Asking for protection again was like trying to retreat into a fantasy cocoon (and nobody was listening, anyway:-).
What surprises me is that so many people in the US today think the current wave of outsourcing is different and try to make this into a moral issue. I can understand the dissapointment of losing a job you love (I've had it happen to me), but I don't see any fundamental difference between what America (and to some extent, Europe and Japan) have been doing in such a dominant way for so long (designing and manufacturing so many of the world's goods), and what is happening in a small way in India right now. If Indian companies decide not to design computers, TVs, cars, DVRs etc. and 'outsource' their designing to companies in the US/Japan, while handling the sales/support in India, how is it different, at a fundamental level, from software outsourcing from the US to India?
I find it hard to understand the US outcry over offshoring. I work in the software industry in India and maybe that explains it, but I also have a personal story to tell about outsourcing from India to the US which caused the loss of my techie job in India. There were other people like me who were affected, but it all happened very quietly, and everyone (including me) assumed there was nothing wrong with it. Here it is :
When I left college (in India) with an EECS engineering degree in the late 70s, the computer industry in India was small but competely local. Tariffs and laws prevented the import of computers, and there were about 6-8 companies in India who designed, manufactured and sold computer systems. The way the laws worked, you could import components (chips, capacitors etc.), but not computers, so these companies were protected from imported computers.
I joined one of these companies and spent several years essentially living in heaven. We were doing leading-edge work and in the space of a few years, I designed several CPUs, I/O processors, graphics processors and OS-level code for things like zero-latency disk reads and inter-processor communications. Others at my company built compilers, database management systems and graphics libraries. This was all proprietary stuff, very expensive because of the cost of all the R&D people like me and the low volumes. But I was doing what I loved, doing it well, and having a blast. I didn't get paid much (All I could afford for several years was a bicycle until I managed to save enough money to buy a small motor--scooter), but I didn't care. I worked 16-hour days just to get my name on the next system that we rolled out.
Somewhere in the mid-80s, the Indian government decided that they shouldn't protect these companies, and everyone should be allowed to buy computers from wherever they want. I wasn't worried. I knew the systems I built were better, and I understood Indian customers much better than the American companies whose systems that were starting to come in. I remember looking at the early IBM PCs and some Unix boxes and feeling smug about how much better our systems were.
You can probably guess the rest of the story. To my utter surprise, my company decided they don't want to have us design their systems any more. Because of their much larger volumes, the US systems cost less, and management calculated they could make more money by getting the basic systems from a US company and focusing on sales, support and custom application development. As a bonus, they got rid of all the wierd techies like me who never quite fitted the corporate culture (they didn't actually fire us, but asked us to move to support/sales, so I quit). The same thing was happening at all the other computer companies, so we didn't find design jobs anywhere else either.
There was no outcry, no political storm, but very quietly and peacefully, my design job had got outsourced to some designers in the US because the final result was cheaper.
There's a long story about what happened next, but for the purposes of this post, the important thing was that I figured out there was no point in blaming the government or my management for what happened to me. All that happened was that something removed the protection I was working behind, and naturally my job went to someone who could do it better than I could. What else could happen? Asking for protection again was like trying to retreat into a fantasy cocoon (and nobody was listening, anyway:-).
What surprises me is that so many people in the US today think the current wave of outsourcing is different and try to make this into a moral issue. I can understand the dissapointment of losing a job you love (I've had it happen to me), but I don't see any fundamental difference between what America (and to some extent, Europe and Japan) have been doing in such a dominant way for so long (designing and manufacturing so many of the world's goods), and what is happening in a small way in India ri
I really need help understanding what this means. TFA is heavy on CEO/analyst statements about how wonderful and important this is, but light on how it works. The closest it comes to it is :
To create the device, SanDisk had to build a lot of computing power into what would otherwise be a dumb memory chip.
What on earth does that mean? Every memory chip has a powerful CPU?
As I see it, a memory chip basically does 2 kinds of operations :
Read, when the appropriate address and read signal is appplied on its pins, and the chip puts out the data.
Write, when an address, data, and a write signal are applied.
So, when the chip sees a read cycle, how does it know whether the program which is asking for the read is reading the data to play the music or to copy it?
... and more to do with poor journalism (CNET's and Slashdot's):
- Phatak is not India. He's a professor in one college in India.
- This is not a massively-funded government project. It's one person trying to design a license agreeement, for God's sake. Anyone can do that without implying a nuclear-weapon-like government strategic program. If a professor in, say, OSU was to design a new license, would Slashdot run a story saying "America designing its own Open Source license"?
- I know Phatak. He's a good teacher, but tends to like thinking up grand visions, and sees himself as some kind of leading light carrying India to leadership and glory in the tech world. Not many people other than him see him that way. No reasonable journalist would report his statements/plans as representing what 'India' is doing.
I continue to be amazed by Slashdot. Every day, I find deeply insightful commentary and clear explanations, particularly on techie topics, but then I also find levels of naivete bordering on blindness, as in the discussion around this topic.
I've seen loud proclamations of support for retaining the 'true definition of science', much head-scratching about why these fundies don't get it, and even more hand-wringing about where the world (and in particular, Kansas) is going, I've not seen any sign that anyone has understood either the motivation that drives these people or the means that they are using.
I'm not sure if this is because Slashdot readership is mostly American, or because the readership is completely geek. (sorry, couldn't resist that, no flames please).
Full disclosure: I'm an Indian in India, was born a Hindu, and have been mostly atheist/agnostic in my beliefs. However, while I don't believe in God in a flowing white beard (or the hundreds of other varieties in the Hindu pantheon), I also don't believe the universe can be explained by space, time, and a set of classical or probabilistic laws.
First, their motivation:
Imagine (I know it's hard, but try) that you believe passionately in the sacrifice of Christ and that the salvation of everyone lies in accepting him and in being forgiven for their sins. How painful must it be for you to see children in their formative years acquire a world view and emotional make-up which makes it impossible for you to get them to see your way of thinking? And there's no point in saying 'why can't they see evolution as God's way of making creation happen?' The reality is that it doesn't work that way. If the mechanism of creation is itself a few simple principles (variation/natural selection), then is there really a need for a Creator to have set them in motion at the beginning? You could take Him out of the picture, and the simple principles can still be there, and will still work. What makes people believe in a all-powerful, personalized God they can accept as saviour is a clear touchy-feely demonstration of sheer, raw power, and in this department, nothing beats creating the universe in 6 days. Get children to believe that, and you'll never have a shortage of souls getting in line to be saved.
Next, the means :
I hear a lot of people saying : 'what's wrong with their new definition, it seems to make things clearer'. This is nonsense. The old definition is :
seeking natural explanations for what we observe around us.
This is actually a very precise expression of attitude and intent, and this becomes clearer if it's changed slightly to read:
seeking natural explanations for everything we observe around us.
This is a frame of mind, and this is the true spirit of science. Through the ages, there has never been a shortage of explanations:
- Eclipses happen because we anger the Sun God.
- The invisible witch cut off his breathing (a popular explanation in India, not a long time ago, for deaths by tubercolosis)
The key attitude which separates science is that it says : 'I will look for non-supernatural principles and predictable rules for everything. It may be hard, but I'll keep trying. I think I'll find such an explanation if I keep trying'.
Read the new definition again. There a lot of fancy wording about experiments and hypotheses which seems to clarify, but is actually being used to hide the key change to the attitude. It doesn't say that science should try to explain everything anymore. In fact, with the bit about explanations being 'adequate', there's an logical next step: Why doesn't science restrict itself to things it is 'adequate' at, such as planetary motion and momentum conservation, and leave other things, like the creation of life, to other, more 'adequate ' explanations?.
On second thoughts, and at the risk of being flamed, I think the reason Slashdot isn't getting this is not because
How does this advance Man in ways that benefit the body, the Family of Man? Will it feed people or solve the mystery of AIDS? Will it allow old people to get their meds cheaper? Isn't there better ways to spend billions of dollars that benefit mankind in a more substantial way?
Okay, I'll bite. I'm seeing a stream of "What use is this?" and "big deal, more red rocks" comments on the Rover topics, and I can't even imagine where these are coming from:
If a big meteorite/virus/climate change/radiation storm/solar instability/nuclear catastrophe/nanotech grey goo/ was to wipe out the entire human population on Earth, the human race isn't going to come back. Forever, for all of eternity (or at least the heat death of the universe, which is what current theory predicts as the human race's equivalent of dying of old age). Surely we should pay *something* to take out an insurance policy against this scenario? A policy which aims for human settlements on Mars?
Getting to these settlements in incredibly hard, and there's no way we can suddenly decide to do it one day and make them happen the next year. It'll take large number of intermediate steps, including unmanned missions, $400m rovers which produce photographs of red rocks, and, when we can, manned missions.
I know you aren't saying this, but to those who call these photographs "boring red rocks", they are incredibly exciting to anyone with any sense of what they represent. For one, we've had to have 2.5 billion years of evolution before any life form on Earth is able to see them. Their size, shape, distribution, constitution, layout ask a thousand questions, some of which the Rover will answer. These answers will help in resolving important scientific questions of meaning to planetology here on Earth.
Even if none of these reasons carry weight, we should do it, to paraphrase a mountaneer, because Mars is there. The purpose of life cannot be to just be to spend everything we have in finding the cure to AIDS and cancer and making it longer. What do we do with this longer life? I cannot imagine a more inspiring way to spend it than to find adventure in the rest of the universe. NASA keeps doing these things which make me proud to be human, and by spending your tax dollars to support it, you are creating and participating in this adventure.
Finally, I'm in India, not the US, so you could argue that it's not my tax money which is paying for this. That is true, but NASA has added to my life in many ways, from the days when as a small kid, I stayed awake nights listening for news updates on the Apollo 11 mission (India didn't have TV back then), to ogling these marvellous Mars photographs and imagining I'm a space traveller using Maestro to investigate a new planet. If someone knows a way a non-American can pay NASA back by sending over pittances when I can, I'll be happy to find a way to do it.
Ethnicity wasn't mentioned in the article or the Slashdot thread. The point being made was that American citizens cannot work in India. However, the ethnic side of it was, perhaps, what they were really trying to say, and by that logic, I agree, the people of Indian origin shouldn't count.
While most people I mentioned are, indeed, of Indian origin, I know of two cases which would fall into the "people of European origin" class, if that is the correct description. Their reasons for being here are surprisingly similar. One if married to an Indian, and the other is working on a relationship with one.
The point I'm making is that I'm happy to have them. My company does work which needs a solid grounding in computer science, deep algotithm and system programming skills. These skills are relatively hard to find in India, and both these developers are outstanding computer scientists. As their manager, I'm scared they'll leave, rather than the other way around.
Software jobs in Indian pay way more than most other industries. Most software people here are trying to make as much as they can while the going's good. Keeping out Americans is very far from being on anyone's agenda.
The article has got the 'working in India' part completely wrong, or maybe thought it sounds more interesting this way. I'm a manager at an Indian software company. I'd rather not enter the moral debate here, but here are some facts:
- We have American and British citizens working at my company.
- The last company I worked in had American citizens working.
- I know of several others working at other companies I know.
- Several of these people are not transferred by American companies to work in India, but applied for (and got) positions in India companies.
Slashdot Mirror
What about jobs which go the other way (coming to the US from, say, India?). This may sound surprising, but it has been happening for decades now. I have a personal story to tell about outsourcing from India to the US which caused the loss of my tech job in India. There were other people like me who were affected, but it all happened very quietly, and everyone (including me) assumed there was nothing wrong with it. Here it is :
:-).
When I left college (in India) with an EECS engineering degree in the early eighties, the computer industry in India was small but competely local. Tariffs and laws prevented the import of computers, and there were about 6-8 companies in India who designed, manufactured and sold computer systems. The way the laws worked, you could import components (chips, capacitors etc.), but not computers, so these companies were protected from imported computers.
I joined one of these companies and spent several years essentially living in heaven. We were doing leading-edge work and in the space of a few years, I designed several CPUs, I/O processors, graphics processors and OS-level code for things like zero-latency disk reads and inter-processor communications. Others at my company built compilers, database management systems and graphics libraries. This was all proprietary stuff, very expensive because of the cost of all the R&D people like me and the low volumes. But I was doing what I loved, doing it well, and having a blast. I didn't get paid much (All I could afford for several years was a bicycle until I managed to save enough money to buy a small motor--scooter), but I didn't care. I worked 16-hour days just to get my name on the next system that we rolled out.
Somewhere in the mid-80s, the Indian government decided that they shouldn't protect these companies, and everyone should be allowed to buy computers from wherever they want. I wasn't worried. I knew the systems I built were better, and I understood Indian customers much better than the American companies whose systems that were starting to come in. I remember looking at the early IBM PCs and some Unix boxes and feeling smug about how much better our systems were.,
You can probably guess the rest of the story. To my utter surprise, my company decided they don't want to have us design their systems any more. Because of their much larger volumes, the US systems cost less, and management calculated they could make more money by getting the basic systems from a US company and focusing on sales, support and custom application development. As a bonus, they got rid of all the wierd techies like me who never quite fitted the corporate culture (they didn't actually fire us, but asked us to move to support/sales, so I quit). The same thing was happening at all the other computer companies, so we didn't find design jobs anywhere else either.
There was no outcry, no political storm, but very quietly and peacefully, my design job had got outsourced to some designers in the US because the final result was cheaper. There's a long story about what happened next, but for the purposes of this post, the important thing was that I figured out there was no point in blaming the government or my management for what happened to me. All that happened was that something removed the protection I was working behind, and naturally my job went to someone who could do it better than I could. What else could happen? Asking for protection again was like trying to retreat into a fantasy cocoon (and nobody was listening, anyway
What surprises me is that so many people in the US today think the current wave of outsourcing is different and try to make this into a moral issue. I can understand the dissapointment of losing a job you love (I've had it happen to me), but I don't see any fundamental difference between what America (and to some extent, Europe and Japan) have been doing in such a dominant way for so long (designing and manufacturing so many of the world's goods), and what is happening in a small way in I
When I left college (in India) with an EECS engineering degree in the early eighties, the computer industry in India was small but competely local. Tariffs and laws prevented the import of computers, and there were about 6-8 companies in India who designed, manufactured and sold computer systems. The way the laws worked, you could import components (chips, capacitors etc.), but not computers, so these companies were protected from imported computers.
I joined one of these companies and spent several years essentially living in heaven. We were doing leading-edge work and in the space of a few years, I designed several CPUs, I/O processors, graphics processors and OS-level code for things like zero-latency disk reads and inter-processor communications. Others at my company built compilers, database management systems and graphics libraries. This was all proprietary stuff, very expensive because of the cost of all the R&D people like me and the low volumes. But I was doing what I loved, doing it well, and having a blast. I didn't get paid much (All I could afford for several years was a bicycle until I managed to save enough money to buy a small motor--scooter), but I didn't care. I worked 16-hour days just to get my name on the next system that we rolled out.
Somewhere in the mid-80s, the Indian government decided that they shouldn't protect these companies, and everyone should be allowed to buy computers from wherever they want. I wasn't worried. I knew the systems I built were better, and I understood Indian customers much better than the American companies whose systems that were starting to come in. I remember looking at the early IBM PCs and some Unix boxes and feeling smug about how much better our systems were.,
You can probably guess the rest of the story. To my utter surprise, my company decided they don't want to have us design their systems any more. Because of their much larger volumes, the US systems cost less, and management calculated they could make more money by getting the basic systems from a US company and focusing on sales, support and custom application development. As a bonus, they got rid of all the wierd techies like me who never quite fitted the corporate culture (they didn't actually fire us, but asked us to move to support/sales, so I quit). The same thing was happening at all the other computer companies, so we didn't find design jobs anywhere else either.
There was no outcry, no political storm, but very quietly and peacefully, my design job had got outsourced to some designers in the US because the final result was cheaper. There's a long story about what happened next, but for the purposes of this post, the important thing was that I figured out there was no point in blaming the government or my management for what happened to me. All that happened was that something removed the protection I was working behind, and naturally my job went to someone who could do it better than I could. What else could happen? Asking for protection again was like trying to retreat into a fantasy cocoon (and nobody was listening, anyway
What surprises me is that so many people in the US today think the current wave of outsourcing is different and try to make this into a moral issue. I can understand the dissapointment of losing a job you love (I've had it happen to me), but I don't see any fundamental difference between what America (and to some extent, Europe and Japan) have been doing in such a dominant way for so long (designing and manufacturing so many of the world's goods), and what is happening in a small way in India right now. If Indian companies decide not to design computers, TVs, cars, DVRs etc. and 'outsource' their designing to companies in the US/Japan, while handling the sales/support in India, how is it different, at a fundamental level, from software outsourcing from the US to India?
When I left college (in India) with an EECS engineering degree in the late 70s, the computer industry in India was small but competely local. Tariffs and laws prevented the import of computers, and there were about 6-8 companies in India who designed, manufactured and sold computer systems. The way the laws worked, you could import components (chips, capacitors etc.), but not computers, so these companies were protected from imported computers.
I joined one of these companies and spent several years essentially living in heaven. We were doing leading-edge work and in the space of a few years, I designed several CPUs, I/O processors, graphics processors and OS-level code for things like zero-latency disk reads and inter-processor communications. Others at my company built compilers, database management systems and graphics libraries. This was all proprietary stuff, very expensive because of the cost of all the R&D people like me and the low volumes. But I was doing what I loved, doing it well, and having a blast. I didn't get paid much (All I could afford for several years was a bicycle until I managed to save enough money to buy a small motor--scooter), but I didn't care. I worked 16-hour days just to get my name on the next system that we rolled out.
Somewhere in the mid-80s, the Indian government decided that they shouldn't protect these companies, and everyone should be allowed to buy computers from wherever they want. I wasn't worried. I knew the systems I built were better, and I understood Indian customers much better than the American companies whose systems that were starting to come in. I remember looking at the early IBM PCs and some Unix boxes and feeling smug about how much better our systems were.
You can probably guess the rest of the story. To my utter surprise, my company decided they don't want to have us design their systems any more. Because of their much larger volumes, the US systems cost less, and management calculated they could make more money by getting the basic systems from a US company and focusing on sales, support and custom application development. As a bonus, they got rid of all the wierd techies like me who never quite fitted the corporate culture (they didn't actually fire us, but asked us to move to support/sales, so I quit). The same thing was happening at all the other computer companies, so we didn't find design jobs anywhere else either.
There was no outcry, no political storm, but very quietly and peacefully, my design job had got outsourced to some designers in the US because the final result was cheaper. There's a long story about what happened next, but for the purposes of this post, the important thing was that I figured out there was no point in blaming the government or my management for what happened to me. All that happened was that something removed the protection I was working behind, and naturally my job went to someone who could do it better than I could. What else could happen? Asking for protection again was like trying to retreat into a fantasy cocoon (and nobody was listening, anyway :-).
What surprises me is that so many people in the US today think the current wave of outsourcing is different and try to make this into a moral issue. I can understand the dissapointment of losing a job you love (I've had it happen to me), but I don't see any fundamental difference between what America (and to some extent, Europe and Japan) have been doing in such a dominant way for so long (designing and manufacturing so many of the world's goods), and what is happening in a small way in India ri
To create the device, SanDisk had to build a lot of computing power into what would otherwise be a dumb memory chip.
What on earth does that mean? Every memory chip has a powerful CPU?
As I see it, a memory chip basically does 2 kinds of operations :
So, when the chip sees a read cycle, how does it know whether the program which is asking for the read is reading the data to play the music or to copy it?
- Phatak is not India. He's a professor in one college in India.
- This is not a massively-funded government project. It's one person trying to design a license agreeement, for God's sake. Anyone can do that without implying a nuclear-weapon-like government strategic program. If a professor in, say, OSU was to design a new license, would Slashdot run a story saying "America designing its own Open Source license"?
- I know Phatak. He's a good teacher, but tends to like thinking up grand visions, and sees himself as some kind of leading light carrying India to leadership and glory in the tech world. Not many people other than him see him that way. No reasonable journalist would report his statements/plans as representing what 'India' is doing.
I've seen loud proclamations of support for retaining the 'true definition of science', much head-scratching about why these fundies don't get it, and even more hand-wringing about where the world (and in particular, Kansas) is going, I've not seen any sign that anyone has understood either the motivation that drives these people or the means that they are using.
I'm not sure if this is because Slashdot readership is mostly American, or because the readership is completely geek. (sorry, couldn't resist that, no flames please).
Full disclosure: I'm an Indian in India, was born a Hindu, and have been mostly atheist/agnostic in my beliefs. However, while I don't believe in God in a flowing white beard (or the hundreds of other varieties in the Hindu pantheon), I also don't believe the universe can be explained by space, time, and a set of classical or probabilistic laws.
First, their motivation:
Imagine (I know it's hard, but try) that you believe passionately in the sacrifice of Christ and that the salvation of everyone lies in accepting him and in being forgiven for their sins. How painful must it be for you to see children in their formative years acquire a world view and emotional make-up which makes it impossible for you to get them to see your way of thinking? And there's no point in saying 'why can't they see evolution as God's way of making creation happen?' The reality is that it doesn't work that way. If the mechanism of creation is itself a few simple principles (variation/natural selection), then is there really a need for a Creator to have set them in motion at the beginning? You could take Him out of the picture, and the simple principles can still be there, and will still work. What makes people believe in a all-powerful, personalized God they can accept as saviour is a clear touchy-feely demonstration of sheer, raw power, and in this department, nothing beats creating the universe in 6 days. Get children to believe that, and you'll never have a shortage of souls getting in line to be saved.
Next, the means :
I hear a lot of people saying : 'what's wrong with their new definition, it seems to make things clearer'. This is nonsense. The old definition is :
seeking natural explanations for what we observe around us.
This is actually a very precise expression of attitude and intent, and this becomes clearer if it's changed slightly to read:
seeking natural explanations for everything we observe around us.
This is a frame of mind, and this is the true spirit of science. Through the ages, there has never been a shortage of explanations:
- Eclipses happen because we anger the Sun God.
- The invisible witch cut off his breathing (a popular explanation in India, not a long time ago, for deaths by tubercolosis)
The key attitude which separates science is that it says : 'I will look for non-supernatural principles and predictable rules for everything. It may be hard, but I'll keep trying. I think I'll find such an explanation if I keep trying'.
Read the new definition again. There a lot of fancy wording about experiments and hypotheses which seems to clarify, but is actually being used to hide the key change to the attitude. It doesn't say that science should try to explain everything anymore. In fact, with the bit about explanations being 'adequate', there's an logical next step: Why doesn't science restrict itself to things it is 'adequate' at, such as planetary motion and momentum conservation, and leave other things, like the creation of life, to other, more 'adequate ' explanations?.
On second thoughts, and at the risk of being flamed, I think the reason Slashdot isn't getting this is not because
Okay, I'll bite. I'm seeing a stream of "What use is this?" and "big deal, more red rocks" comments on the Rover topics, and I can't even imagine where these are coming from:
- If a big meteorite/virus/climate change/radiation storm/solar instability/nuclear catastrophe/nanotech grey goo/ was to wipe out the entire human population on Earth, the human race isn't going to come back. Forever, for all of eternity (or at least the heat death of the universe, which is what current theory predicts as the human race's equivalent of dying of old age). Surely we should pay *something* to take out an insurance policy against this scenario? A policy which aims for human settlements on Mars?
- Getting to these settlements in incredibly hard, and there's no way we can suddenly decide to do it one day and make them happen the next year. It'll take large number of intermediate steps, including unmanned missions, $400m rovers which produce photographs of red rocks, and, when we can, manned missions.
- I know you aren't saying this, but to those who call these photographs "boring red rocks", they are incredibly exciting to anyone with any sense of what they represent. For one, we've had to have 2.5 billion years of evolution before any life form on Earth is able to see them. Their size, shape, distribution, constitution, layout ask a thousand questions, some of which the Rover will answer. These answers will help in resolving important scientific questions of meaning to planetology here on Earth.
- Even if none of these reasons carry weight, we should do it, to paraphrase a mountaneer, because Mars is there. The purpose of life cannot be to just be to spend everything we have in finding the cure to AIDS and cancer and making it longer. What do we do with this longer life? I cannot imagine a more inspiring way to spend it than to find adventure in the rest of the universe. NASA keeps doing these things which make me proud to be human, and by spending your tax dollars to support it, you are creating and participating in this adventure.
Finally, I'm in India, not the US, so you could argue that it's not my tax money which is paying for this. That is true, but NASA has added to my life in many ways, from the days when as a small kid, I stayed awake nights listening for news updates on the Apollo 11 mission (India didn't have TV back then), to ogling these marvellous Mars photographs and imagining I'm a space traveller using Maestro to investigate a new planet. If someone knows a way a non-American can pay NASA back by sending over pittances when I can, I'll be happy to find a way to do it.Ethnicity wasn't mentioned in the article or the Slashdot thread. The point being made was that American citizens cannot work in India. However, the ethnic side of it was, perhaps, what they were really trying to say, and by that logic, I agree, the people of Indian origin shouldn't count. While most people I mentioned are, indeed, of Indian origin, I know of two cases which would fall into the "people of European origin" class, if that is the correct description. Their reasons for being here are surprisingly similar. One if married to an Indian, and the other is working on a relationship with one. The point I'm making is that I'm happy to have them. My company does work which needs a solid grounding in computer science, deep algotithm and system programming skills. These skills are relatively hard to find in India, and both these developers are outstanding computer scientists. As their manager, I'm scared they'll leave, rather than the other way around. Software jobs in Indian pay way more than most other industries. Most software people here are trying to make as much as they can while the going's good. Keeping out Americans is very far from being on anyone's agenda.
The article has got the 'working in India' part completely wrong, or maybe thought it sounds more interesting this way. I'm a manager at an Indian software company. I'd rather not enter the moral debate here, but here are some facts: - We have American and British citizens working at my company. - The last company I worked in had American citizens working. - I know of several others working at other companies I know. - Several of these people are not transferred by American companies to work in India, but applied for (and got) positions in India companies.