Are you aware that the average Prius gets worse mileage than many European cars - I've managed to outdo a Prius fuel efficiency in both a Mercedes *and* a BMW and I believe some of the smaller Volkswagens and even some large Jaguars kick the Prius' ass in the same respect.
Some studies are suggesting that the Prius is *worse* (environmentally) than many SUVs and at the end of the day will do more damage, considering all the stuff that's required for it's batteries before it even reaches you.
In most major metros in India it doesn't need to do 45mph (or to use the proper civilized measurements, 72km/h)... it merely needs to be able to sit in traffic idling and provide decent A/C to the inhabitants. At most times of the day, you'd be lucky to hit 15mph on many streets.
The primary bonus to this car for India is it's cleanliness and if we get ride of some of the junk that's on Indian roads maybe we can venture out in to the city without inhaling air that's so polluted it's like smoking 2 packs a day - and if it can get me to nearby places (the outskirts of Mumbai, Pune, Nashik etc) then that's 2 bonuses.
Yet another person comparing the average income of a billion people with the actual potential market size.
In some states $2k means you're flush while in others, you're broke. Same as America - I'm sure you can live in the backwaters of some US states for next to nothing but you couldn't survive in any of the major centres.
The market for this car is most likely to have an urban base, so why don't we look at the average income in urban areas instead, which is, in many of them, hovering somewhere around the $10-12k mark for many.
$20k? Dream on. Forgetting the domestically produced el-cheapo boxes, your average entry-level Toyota starts at around 3.5 lakhs or US$6k-ish... double that and you've got US$12k which sounds about right for urban areas - the middle classes are easily earning this kind of money and there are large numbers of people who fall right in to that category.
India is vast. It has vast differences in lifestyles, standards of living and yes, incomes. It is very unequal in all of these things - and as I have already alluded to, there is a huge Urban-Rural divide as well. One might earn $1000 a year and another $10,000 and another might earn $100,000 but they're all being counted in terms of their GDP contribution - and with so much of India's population being rural, the appearance of $1500 being a "median income" is actually pretty misleading.
I don't pay my maid enough to buy a car (and if I did I would be lynched by my neighbours because she'd tell everyone what a great salary I'm paying and then they'd all demand it too) so the chances of her owning a car are kind of slim, but furthermore, US$1500 is a lot in some rural area where they don't have electricity or running water or broadband to pay for and the latest luxury is a $50 cellphone - compare that to us urbanites who could spend that much every year just on morning coffees. I don't expect some farmer in the foothills of the Himalayas to know about, want or be able to afford this car at this price, but my friends in any of the major centres? Definitely.
There's a lot of false maths going on here - the GDP per capita might be $1500 but that's not the average salary - my maid probably makes about the same as the guy who shines my shoes at the railway station but my employees make more than that - $10-12k a year isn't out of the question in many cities, especially Mumbai, which means that a car costing $10k is in the realms of affordability BUT Indians are not credit-whores like us Westerners - the younger generation is becoming that way a little bit but many Indians will scrimp and save for 2, 3, 4, 5 years so that he has enough money to buy what he wants.
All this is difficult to calculate in a place like India because it's largely a cash society PLUS people don't pay a lot of the taxes they would technically owe PLUS being that many people (such as maids and whatnot) get paid in cash their incomes probably don't even get counted towards GDP.
You're both right in some respect. I don't know what the exact figures are this week, but in recent years middle-class incomes have risen pretty sharply - I think about 6 lakhs a year is "normal" now, whereas 3-4 years ago 3-4 lakhs was about average, and they reckon 10 lakhs isn't far off.
(For you non-Indians, 1 lakh = 100,000 rupees which is about US$1,800 at the current exchange rate).
It also depends on who you believe - recently the Indian government tried to cheat the poor out of being considered poor by attempting to redefine the poverty rate at something like Rs34/day - about half of the International poverty line as I recall... for what purpose I can't quite ascertain, but maybe just to make the country look better or give the appearance of growth or poverty problems magically being solved.
Anyway, there are a lot of middle class. There are a lot of poor. There are quite a lot of rich. And the divides between the 3 are far more significant than most other countries.
Ever been to Tbilisi? They're so proud of all their churches and much of the population is strongly orthodox christian - to the extent of observing all the holidays and festivals which us agnostics or people who were merely born in to predominantly christian societies just don't bother with.
The different between Joe Bloggs on Slashdot and Bourne is that he had something like 10 passports and large wads of cash and a safe-deposit box - and being an agent the passports would have been "real" (as in, for the explicit purpose of crossing borders and being invisible - I believe a line in the first movie actually alluded to the very fact that "they" had trained him to be invisible, didn't it?)
The main problem with trying to get to India, Russia, China, Africa or some parts of South America if you're from certain countries is that you will need a visa in advance. This will take time (which you will not have) and create a record of your intention to exit the country (and if you do manage to actually board a plane without being caught, then entry in to another country), so to achieve this easily you would need more than one passport from more than one nation, preferably one that is on friendly diplomatic terms with the country in which you intend to disappear (so Ukrainian passport for Russia, US/CA/UK/AU/NZ/JP passport for EU/US/CA, NZ/AU/EU/JP passport for South America, NZ/SG/FI/JP passports for India etc).
Disappearing in China easier said that done simply for want of getting in and out undetected unless you want to try/risk getting through some pretty dodgy territory and over a land border from India through somewhere like Arunachal Pradesh (assuming you hold one of the 5 passports that you can get in to India with on a tourist visa)... Russia's a little difficult but probably easier than China, and potentially could allow you to get in to some super interesting places (ending in 'stan) or in to Mongolia which is a largely nomadic nation.
I don't know enough about Africa but you're potentially at as much risk by virtue of being in many parts of Africa as you would be in your country of origin under the circumstances, so most of it might be a region to avoid. I'd also never go to an island unless it's part of an archipelago because while it might be fun for a while and it might feel safe, you run the risk of 1. severe boredom and 2. getting wasted when you can't get out if (when) they manage to track you down.
But, if that's not your cup of tea, then perhaps despite what it may seem like with the density and all, Europe is a reasonably good choice: the schengen visa covers a number of states through which you can traverse without too much checking. Road and Rail travel is possible (both on and off the grid: you could either buy a cheap car under a secondary identity in Germany, hitchhike, take advantage of things like EURAIL passes and so forth) to get where you need to go. You can move frequently and you can move often.
There are a few "interesting" countries which are now part of the EU and not as backwards as you might imagine - Romania and Bulgaria, for example, but there are others as well - you could even venture in to Turkey and Georgia without too much difficulty. Even though this would create a record of your movement (land borders), the countries themselves are just disorganized enough that unless you did anything to bring attention to yourself, hanging about in a city like Istanbul or Tbilisi isn't too shabby - or you could head over to the Black Sea at Samsun or Poti respectively.
All in all, my choice would probably be determined by how much money I have and for how long I can expect that to last in the event that I can't get some under-the-table temp work.
If you have a meeting that involves women, then in most metros they won't be allowed (by their families or by the society itself) to stay too late due to the dangers of being out at night and a lot of companies don't want to actually spend the money on providing safe transportation (in the form of a private car or more commonly a shared car with a few women).
Or there are society norms: neighbours or the building security guards might think she's doing something "immoral" if she comes home late at night on a frequent basis - although if they work the night shift and come home at 7am that seems fine. Go figure.
The other is because work in India starts at 10 and stops at about 10:15 (...the work ethic isn't really all it's cracked up to be... well, to be fair, long hours yes but quality... not as much... and frequent tea breaks).
What hardware are you running? I don't seem to recall having to do anything spectacular to get any of the distros (usually Ubuntu, occasionally SuSE, more lately Mint) working on any of the laptops I've had since 2005.
On my current machine (Toshiba Satellite), eSATA, WiFi, the Webcam and all my USB devices (including 2 Nokia phones & a Blackberry) work just fine, although I've been passing these through in to a VirtualBox Windows XP installation because Wammu doesn't do what I want it to (convert an SQL database to CSV, import the CSV file to Outlook and sync with contacts in Nokia Suite to sync with the phone, the only part which actually takes any significant time being the tidying up of the CSV file for import and which really doesn't have anything to do with which OS I use for that).
Other than that I'm not having any difficulties using Linux for Business, Personal and Technical reasons. For personal use, Flash in Chrome works fine and most of the apps I'd be using on Windows are available in Linux - VLC, Pidgin, Skype etc - anyway.
For technical use, I can SSH directly from terminal (no PuTTY needed). I was using Deluge for torrents but am now using uTorrent under WINE because somehow it just seems better. I haven't found a good replacement for WinSCP though (my server doesn't have FTP/SFTP enabled...) so I'm using that under WINE as well.
For business use, the only issues I've had involve Adobe Creative Suite and the aforementioned part about still having to boot up a Windows virtual machine to use Nokia suite - but my accounting software has shifted to a web-based platform, I get on just fine with LibreOffice and Thunderbird gives me far more flexibility than Outlook (I used Thunderbird on Windows anyway).
As an added bonus, my important files are automatically backed up to Google Drive, DropBox and UbuntuOne. I've customized the Unity bar to largely disappear and have replaced that with CairoDock and using the Super (Windows) Key brings up the HUD, which I actually kinda like because I feel it to be more efficient than using a menu anyway since I can type the first few letters of whatever I'm looking for and get results pretty quickly.
As mentioned earlier, on my three previous laptops (2 HPs and before that an Acer) I've been dual-booting Linux (usually Ubuntu) since 2005 but never really had any issues - back in the day I may have had to do some configuration for X but it's been a long time since I had to touch a configuration file for anything to get hardware working - software is a little bit of a different story (for example associating.torrent files and magnet links with uTorrent) but again, this doesn't relate to the type of issues you're talking about.
So there could be two things at play here: either I'm extraordinarily lucky, or, since I'm using "common" hardware rather than bleeding edge stuff I'm managing to ensure for myself a Linux experience where stuff "just works": this may just be the key and seems to fit with the premise behind the original headline. Apple has designed the Retina MBP for use with OS-X (and built OS-X modules to deal with the hardware accordingly - such is their privilege for controlling the whole hardware/software eco-system), whereas the Linux community has not yet been able to do that and I suspect there won't be any Windows drivers either.
In my own experience, I have installed countless Windows machines (I used to work for a small local manufacturer around the time of XP's release and part of my job was preparing the software for the users -including Windows Update and applications that they wanted installed - prior to running sysprep and sealing the machine up for them) and I got in to the habit of baking software-install CDs to save me time which would be updated about once a month - it saved me from waiting for WindowsUpdate to download what was then even many hundreds of megabytes each for a few dozen machines per day (the drive images weren't updated nearly as often). The very fact that I had to
Ah yes, should probably also point out about the witch thing: most of the people convicted of witchcraft were hanged, not burned. The amount who were burned was very very small (100?), according to all but the sensationalists.
You're rewriting history here. There are some pretty good documentaries on Netflix about Hirosjima and Nagaski. Technically you are right, but the Japanese government made the choice by themselves. They had the option to surrender before Hirosjima. After Hirosjima, before Nagasaki, they had the option to surrender. They chose not to. Had the U.S. not used the weapon, the war could (and probably would) have cost millions of more lives.
Similarly the Allied Forces could have surrendered too. Given the fastidiousness and financial responsibility of the Germans and the Japanese for perfecting everything they try, who is to say that had the war ended differently the world would be worse off? It certainly helped advance the technologies that are all available to us now which I'm sure few of us Slashdotters would object to.
At the end of the day, Americans can't make a car or a any electronic device worth a damn (both the Germans and Japanese do it reasonably well), the bankers have pretty much bankrupted not just the country, but the world (the Germans are bailing out Europe at the moment and the Japanese economy, while slow, isn't doing as badly as some of the others). Germany and Japan have far superior social systems (including healthcare) and better roads... actually, just writing this post I'm beginning to wonder what it would be like if, in an alternative universe, the other side had won.
You are correct here. Did the U.S. government ever apologize for this?
The Catholic Church only recently apologized for the inquisition. Doesn't make it any worse. We might say that ideally it should not have happened in the first place, but then these events shaped the world and we have to wonder what the alternative realities would be had the events occurred differently.
And the Dutch. And the English. And the Spanish. That was a thing of that era.
Brought to the US perhaps, but enslaved? I'm not much of an expert on American history, but I don't even vaguely remember reading about any European slaves.
That's even longer ago. You can't compare our generations with generations centuries ago. If it would not have been for the Catholic Church, no suspected witch would ever have been burned. Same story, same history lesson.
Ah, you've lost me. No witches were burned at Salem, and most of the European witch trials ended in acquittal - which for that period seems oddly favourable!!
I get your point, I really do. But instead of focusing on the negative sides of your country, focus on the positive ones. Every society can be evil. I chose to live in the U.S. because at this point in time I feel that the U.S. is the less evil of all (is that proper grammar?). There are things that I disagree with, like Guantanamo, like Assange, like Manning, like the TSA's groping, but in the end, it's not that bad.
While I share your opinions on this, I've also been avoiding even visiting the US for some of the reasons you've mentioned (and some others you haven't).
I come from a country that's super liberal. I've lived predominantly in other countries that are also relatively liberal. I currently live in a country which is quite conservative (not just politically) and which is run by people apparently even less competent, more corrupt and probably more evil than the US, where I'm subject to a groping not just at airports but any time I enter a mall or movie theatre (yet terrorism still runs rife, so the security measures are even more of a farce than anything the TSA could dream of)...
But, at least I know I won't get shot, tazed or arrested if I open my mouth at a cop (they'd probably miss at point-blank range anyway, the guns are that old)... the worst I'm likely to encounter do is waste 10 hours of my time while I sit at the police station drinking tea and waiting for paperwork to be filled out, stamped in triplicate and then xeroxed enough time
The very nature of the Internet makes this impossible. You couldn't get 10mbit/s to a website in Casablanca, Morocco from Los Angeles, USA because of distances and congestion between the two points on this earth UNLESS you literally go out and buy some kind of IPLC between the two places.
>>>Would you buy a computer that claims 8GB of ram but you could only utilize 3?
That's a software problem - and a stupid manufacturer for including a 32-bit OS on a machine clearly meant for a 64-bit one.
>>>Would you buy a camera that claimed it could take 1000 pictures but only could store 100 maximum?
In this case this would be an "ideal" number used for advertising, but how many cameras are advertised this way?
>>>Would you buy a car that advertised 200 HP but could only output 50 HP? >>>Would you buy a 3 bedroom house that only has 1.5 bedrooms? >>>Would you buy a food product with printed 350g on the container but the contents only weigh 180g? >>>Would you pay for a meal if it claimed it would come with sides that you never received? >>>Would you buy a gallon of gas if you only got a pint? >>>Would you buy a 24 pack of beer if you only got 16?
All of these would be examples of fraud.
The lines provided by your ISP are probably capable of the speeds they're advertising, however, this can only remain true when you have under a certain percentage of the users saturating the lines at any given time.
To put it another way, your 200HP car will only use 50HP if there's a lot of congestion on the road, and the ISP is selling their product in a similar fashion: your connection can technically do 20 or 50 or 100mbit/s without any issues BUT if there's a lot of congestion it's going to be slower than that.
>>>If I buy a hamburger and fries with a coke at BK, the chuckle-heads behind the counter don't come out and take back ten fries and half the burger. >>>If I buy a tank of gas the pump guy doesn't follow me around with a hose and siphon back a couple gallons >>>When I use water the city doesn't ask me to pay for 5 hundred gallons and then say I can only use 4 hundred gallons because 5 hundred would just be too much
In these examples you are buying a finite amount of product.
>>>When I buy cable TV no one stops me from watching TV 24/7 because I might use too much.
This is the only one where you are using a resource in an unlimited fashion - although one could argue that the metrics are entirely different because the channel is not dedicated to you - the cost of the channel/programming is shared between yourself and the million other customers of your cable TV provider. If you got a dedicated channel with dedicated content (and you had to pay the salaries and production costs of the same quality of programming), it'd cost you quite a bit more.
>>>On my land-line I can make non-stop phone calls to Guam and ask the operator there to connect me to Paris and from there to my next-door neighbor and no one complains that I am tying up a line.
Are you on the phone 24x7x365? I didn't think so. And chances are that this is a VOIP call - there are no "lines" to tie up. The rates they charge vs the costs they incur are sufficiently different that making large volumes of calls to countries with low termination rates (like France) doesn't matter, but even then, I'm fairly sure there would be a fair-usage policy attached to your landline.
Clearly you've never tried laying infrastructure. You're forgetting all of the costs associated with civil works and so forth, and these make up a pretty significant portion of the overall costs of laying infrastructure, whereas, contrary to what you claim, the cost of the ONT is actually a fairly small part of the total (by most accounts 15% at most), so, I'd like to know what studies you've been reading, because the ones I've got in my hands indicate that you're looking at the better part of US$2,000 per household if we assume suburban conditions in a first-world country (detached housing, 30m road frontage, 5-15m from the footpath to the door).
Where I'm laying fibre it costs me about US$1,000 for a 48-apartment building BUT this is NOT including the customer equipment (between $50 and $150 depending on the unit) or the civil works (varies by neighbourhood, city & method) or labour... which is only about $50 per apartment but by the time they get service I've still spent over $300 which I then have to recoup - in a third-world country - and so my baseline price for infrastructure is $20 or so per month before I've even delivered any bandwidth, irrespective of speed or usage or equipment in my DC.
And you're also forgetting about OPEX, which, while quite low with fibre, still do exist and have to be accounted for.
Anyway, after all of that, I have to think about bandwidth & distribution. If I contend bandwidth at 50:1 at my network border I'm probably looking at around $40/subscriber (if I offer say 50mbit/s to the end users) but due to the aforementioned contention ratio I can actually only "afford" about 1mbit/s worth of usage (or somewhere around 300GB/month), hence I am forced to implement a fair-usage policy if I'm to keep my prices palatable, and even at these speeds, I'm not going to saturate my PON tree, but frankly, that's the least of my worries.
Now, I will grant you that my bandwidth prices are significantly higher than what I would find in the USA, but, even at $1/mbit for peering bandwidth there are still costs which you're not taking in to account, and I should also like to point out that you're also assuming that every ISP is using FTTH or ready to start building FTTH at an outright cost of $X per subscriber (depending on your location etc) - instead we need to look at what the costs are now given the majority of the world is unfortunately still on DSL or Cable which have a completely different set of overheads.
I think what people (including myself) are trying to point out is that you are *not* paying for a dedicated 50mbit/s pipe. You are paying to share that bandwidth with your neighbours/street/neighbourhood/town.
Using your logic of the buffet, one could also say that the restaurant would throw you out if you tried to take the entire buffet. What is served there is for everyone in the restaurant, not just your table, and the all-you-can-eat idea is based on the premise that you can only realistically consume so much as a human being. You can not literally sit there 24x7x365 consuming every piece of food the restaurant puts out, so why do you think you should be allowed to do the same with your Internet? Just because your computer can sit there doing something 24x7x365, you as a human being cannot. This is part of the problem, actually.
The kind of usage you're describing (being allowed to saturate your 50mbit/s pipe 24x7) simply would not be considered reasonable - that equates to about... 15TB a month of transfer, which is surprisingly difficult to maintain (tried it) but also is well beyond the realms (at this time) of the average user who probably has 1 or 2TB if they're lucky... it's only us geeks (and businesses and people who *need* large storage arrays) who actually have 4, 8, 16 or more TB at our disposal at the moment. This will change, of course, but as will the ISP offerings.
Anyway, with regards to the use of the word "unlimited", deep down in the recesses of the agreement you'd have signed when you subscribed, the ISP will have a clause somewhere outlining that your usage should be "reasonable" or "fair" (if it's not got a limit that is explicitly defined) and that excessive usage will lead to "traffic management" and so on.
As such, I think that while in some respects you are right in that ISPs should put up or shut up on the promise of "unlimited bandwidth", the simple fact is that truly unlimited bandwidth likely is *not* possible, and it's really the advertising that needs to change, that is to say that basically, no ISP can realistically offer "unlimited bandwidth" these days, period, and the terminology should be replaced.
I personally like "flat-rate" as it refers to pricing, not usage - and with that, we can define the usage as simply being "reasonable" - some ISPs I've seen define this as "up to 5x the average user" (which comes out at anywhere from 100 to 400GB per month depending on the ISP/country/etc) and at the end of the day, if some traffic is zero-rated thanks to peering with [insert streaming service of choice, be it Netflix, Hulu, iSky (NZ), Bigflix (India), Quikflix (Aussie), Youtube etc etc etc] then the worries about crossing some arbitrary bandwidth cap can disappear and become almost irrelevant.
Aussie has numerous cables (4 or 5 not including SxC, soon adding another major cable to Singapore) compared to our 1... Would have been 2, but too many of the folks with money are too pussy to put it up for what was Pacific Fibre and now that's been scrapped. They could/should have *at least* got a pipe going from Auckland or Wellington to Sydney for under 1/4 of the cost to get it started so that NZ ISPs would have a chance at buying bandwidth on the Australian market, but alas... anyway, as a result of the cable competition, the price per megabit is significantly less, resulting in better plan offerings from most of the major ISPs: a 1TB plan is AUD$99 whereas in NZ that same plan is over NZ$300.
So the Netflix guy was kind of right, although, something *can* be done about this: cache the files locally and the costs come down dramatically as the content is served domestically and domestic capacity in NZ is actually reasonably cheap,.. it's just that dastardly SxC's hold on international bandwidth that's killing our country.
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Are you aware that the average Prius gets worse mileage than many European cars - I've managed to outdo a Prius fuel efficiency in both a Mercedes *and* a BMW and I believe some of the smaller Volkswagens and even some large Jaguars kick the Prius' ass in the same respect.
Some studies are suggesting that the Prius is *worse* (environmentally) than many SUVs and at the end of the day will do more damage, considering all the stuff that's required for it's batteries before it even reaches you.
In most major metros in India it doesn't need to do 45mph (or to use the proper civilized measurements, 72km/h)... it merely needs to be able to sit in traffic idling and provide decent A/C to the inhabitants. At most times of the day, you'd be lucky to hit 15mph on many streets.
The primary bonus to this car for India is it's cleanliness and if we get ride of some of the junk that's on Indian roads maybe we can venture out in to the city without inhaling air that's so polluted it's like smoking 2 packs a day - and if it can get me to nearby places (the outskirts of Mumbai, Pune, Nashik etc) then that's 2 bonuses.
Damn, I appear to have run out of mod points. Mod up.
Yet another person comparing the average income of a billion people with the actual potential market size.
In some states $2k means you're flush while in others, you're broke. Same as America - I'm sure you can live in the backwaters of some US states for next to nothing but you couldn't survive in any of the major centres.
The market for this car is most likely to have an urban base, so why don't we look at the average income in urban areas instead, which is, in many of them, hovering somewhere around the $10-12k mark for many.
$20k? Dream on. Forgetting the domestically produced el-cheapo boxes, your average entry-level Toyota starts at around 3.5 lakhs or US$6k-ish... double that and you've got US$12k which sounds about right for urban areas - the middle classes are easily earning this kind of money and there are large numbers of people who fall right in to that category.
India is vast. It has vast differences in lifestyles, standards of living and yes, incomes. It is very unequal in all of these things - and as I have already alluded to, there is a huge Urban-Rural divide as well. One might earn $1000 a year and another $10,000 and another might earn $100,000 but they're all being counted in terms of their GDP contribution - and with so much of India's population being rural, the appearance of $1500 being a "median income" is actually pretty misleading.
I don't pay my maid enough to buy a car (and if I did I would be lynched by my neighbours because she'd tell everyone what a great salary I'm paying and then they'd all demand it too) so the chances of her owning a car are kind of slim, but furthermore, US$1500 is a lot in some rural area where they don't have electricity or running water or broadband to pay for and the latest luxury is a $50 cellphone - compare that to us urbanites who could spend that much every year just on morning coffees. I don't expect some farmer in the foothills of the Himalayas to know about, want or be able to afford this car at this price, but my friends in any of the major centres? Definitely.
There's a lot of false maths going on here - the GDP per capita might be $1500 but that's not the average salary - my maid probably makes about the same as the guy who shines my shoes at the railway station but my employees make more than that - $10-12k a year isn't out of the question in many cities, especially Mumbai, which means that a car costing $10k is in the realms of affordability BUT Indians are not credit-whores like us Westerners - the younger generation is becoming that way a little bit but many Indians will scrimp and save for 2, 3, 4, 5 years so that he has enough money to buy what he wants.
All this is difficult to calculate in a place like India because it's largely a cash society PLUS people don't pay a lot of the taxes they would technically owe PLUS being that many people (such as maids and whatnot) get paid in cash their incomes probably don't even get counted towards GDP.
You're both right in some respect. I don't know what the exact figures are this week, but in recent years middle-class incomes have risen pretty sharply - I think about 6 lakhs a year is "normal" now, whereas 3-4 years ago 3-4 lakhs was about average, and they reckon 10 lakhs isn't far off.
(For you non-Indians, 1 lakh = 100,000 rupees which is about US$1,800 at the current exchange rate).
It also depends on who you believe - recently the Indian government tried to cheat the poor out of being considered poor by attempting to redefine the poverty rate at something like Rs34/day - about half of the International poverty line as I recall... for what purpose I can't quite ascertain, but maybe just to make the country look better or give the appearance of growth or poverty problems magically being solved.
Anyway, there are a lot of middle class. There are a lot of poor. There are quite a lot of rich. And the divides between the 3 are far more significant than most other countries.
Ever been to Tbilisi? They're so proud of all their churches and much of the population is strongly orthodox christian - to the extent of observing all the holidays and festivals which us agnostics or people who were merely born in to predominantly christian societies just don't bother with.
The different between Joe Bloggs on Slashdot and Bourne is that he had something like 10 passports and large wads of cash and a safe-deposit box - and being an agent the passports would have been "real" (as in, for the explicit purpose of crossing borders and being invisible - I believe a line in the first movie actually alluded to the very fact that "they" had trained him to be invisible, didn't it?)
You've recently seen "The next 3 days" haven't you?
The main problem with trying to get to India, Russia, China, Africa or some parts of South America if you're from certain countries is that you will need a visa in advance. This will take time (which you will not have) and create a record of your intention to exit the country (and if you do manage to actually board a plane without being caught, then entry in to another country), so to achieve this easily you would need more than one passport from more than one nation, preferably one that is on friendly diplomatic terms with the country in which you intend to disappear (so Ukrainian passport for Russia, US/CA/UK/AU/NZ/JP passport for EU/US/CA, NZ/AU/EU/JP passport for South America, NZ/SG/FI/JP passports for India etc).
Disappearing in China easier said that done simply for want of getting in and out undetected unless you want to try/risk getting through some pretty dodgy territory and over a land border from India through somewhere like Arunachal Pradesh (assuming you hold one of the 5 passports that you can get in to India with on a tourist visa)... Russia's a little difficult but probably easier than China, and potentially could allow you to get in to some super interesting places (ending in 'stan) or in to Mongolia which is a largely nomadic nation.
I don't know enough about Africa but you're potentially at as much risk by virtue of being in many parts of Africa as you would be in your country of origin under the circumstances, so most of it might be a region to avoid. I'd also never go to an island unless it's part of an archipelago because while it might be fun for a while and it might feel safe, you run the risk of 1. severe boredom and 2. getting wasted when you can't get out if (when) they manage to track you down.
But, if that's not your cup of tea, then perhaps despite what it may seem like with the density and all, Europe is a reasonably good choice: the schengen visa covers a number of states through which you can traverse without too much checking. Road and Rail travel is possible (both on and off the grid: you could either buy a cheap car under a secondary identity in Germany, hitchhike, take advantage of things like EURAIL passes and so forth) to get where you need to go. You can move frequently and you can move often.
There are a few "interesting" countries which are now part of the EU and not as backwards as you might imagine - Romania and Bulgaria, for example, but there are others as well - you could even venture in to Turkey and Georgia without too much difficulty. Even though this would create a record of your movement (land borders), the countries themselves are just disorganized enough that unless you did anything to bring attention to yourself, hanging about in a city like Istanbul or Tbilisi isn't too shabby - or you could head over to the Black Sea at Samsun or Poti respectively.
All in all, my choice would probably be determined by how much money I have and for how long I can expect that to last in the event that I can't get some under-the-table temp work.
Secondary note: I don't have these issues in my company but I also don't often have to have International calls we're a local provider.
There could be many reasons:
If you have a meeting that involves women, then in most metros they won't be allowed (by their families or by the society itself) to stay too late due to the dangers of being out at night and a lot of companies don't want to actually spend the money on providing safe transportation (in the form of a private car or more commonly a shared car with a few women).
Or there are society norms: neighbours or the building security guards might think she's doing something "immoral" if she comes home late at night on a frequent basis - although if they work the night shift and come home at 7am that seems fine. Go figure.
The other is because work in India starts at 10 and stops at about 10:15 (...the work ethic isn't really all it's cracked up to be... well, to be fair, long hours yes but quality... not as much... and frequent tea breaks).
Note: I'm not Indian but I do live and work here.
What hardware are you running? I don't seem to recall having to do anything spectacular to get any of the distros (usually Ubuntu, occasionally SuSE, more lately Mint) working on any of the laptops I've had since 2005.
On my current machine (Toshiba Satellite), eSATA, WiFi, the Webcam and all my USB devices (including 2 Nokia phones & a Blackberry) work just fine, although I've been passing these through in to a VirtualBox Windows XP installation because Wammu doesn't do what I want it to (convert an SQL database to CSV, import the CSV file to Outlook and sync with contacts in Nokia Suite to sync with the phone, the only part which actually takes any significant time being the tidying up of the CSV file for import and which really doesn't have anything to do with which OS I use for that).
Other than that I'm not having any difficulties using Linux for Business, Personal and Technical reasons. For personal use, Flash in Chrome works fine and most of the apps I'd be using on Windows are available in Linux - VLC, Pidgin, Skype etc - anyway.
For technical use, I can SSH directly from terminal (no PuTTY needed). I was using Deluge for torrents but am now using uTorrent under WINE because somehow it just seems better. I haven't found a good replacement for WinSCP though (my server doesn't have FTP/SFTP enabled...) so I'm using that under WINE as well.
For business use, the only issues I've had involve Adobe Creative Suite and the aforementioned part about still having to boot up a Windows virtual machine to use Nokia suite - but my accounting software has shifted to a web-based platform, I get on just fine with LibreOffice and Thunderbird gives me far more flexibility than Outlook (I used Thunderbird on Windows anyway).
As an added bonus, my important files are automatically backed up to Google Drive, DropBox and UbuntuOne. I've customized the Unity bar to largely disappear and have replaced that with CairoDock and using the Super (Windows) Key brings up the HUD, which I actually kinda like because I feel it to be more efficient than using a menu anyway since I can type the first few letters of whatever I'm looking for and get results pretty quickly.
As mentioned earlier, on my three previous laptops (2 HPs and before that an Acer) I've been dual-booting Linux (usually Ubuntu) since 2005 but never really had any issues - back in the day I may have had to do some configuration for X but it's been a long time since I had to touch a configuration file for anything to get hardware working - software is a little bit of a different story (for example associating .torrent files and magnet links with uTorrent) but again, this doesn't relate to the type of issues you're talking about.
So there could be two things at play here: either I'm extraordinarily lucky, or, since I'm using "common" hardware rather than bleeding edge stuff I'm managing to ensure for myself a Linux experience where stuff "just works": this may just be the key and seems to fit with the premise behind the original headline. Apple has designed the Retina MBP for use with OS-X (and built OS-X modules to deal with the hardware accordingly - such is their privilege for controlling the whole hardware/software eco-system), whereas the Linux community has not yet been able to do that and I suspect there won't be any Windows drivers either.
In my own experience, I have installed countless Windows machines (I used to work for a small local manufacturer around the time of XP's release and part of my job was preparing the software for the users -including Windows Update and applications that they wanted installed - prior to running sysprep and sealing the machine up for them) and I got in to the habit of baking software-install CDs to save me time which would be updated about once a month - it saved me from waiting for WindowsUpdate to download what was then even many hundreds of megabytes each for a few dozen machines per day (the drive images weren't updated nearly as often). The very fact that I had to
Finally, someone who recognizes the actual status of a diplomatic mission within a host country and the laws of diplomacy.
Ah yes, should probably also point out about the witch thing: most of the people convicted of witchcraft were hanged, not burned. The amount who were burned was very very small (100?), according to all but the sensationalists.
You're rewriting history here. There are some pretty good documentaries on Netflix about Hirosjima and Nagaski. Technically you are right, but the Japanese government made the choice by themselves. They had the option to surrender before Hirosjima. After Hirosjima, before Nagasaki, they had the option to surrender. They chose not to. Had the U.S. not used the weapon, the war could (and probably would) have cost millions of more lives.
Similarly the Allied Forces could have surrendered too. Given the fastidiousness and financial responsibility of the Germans and the Japanese for perfecting everything they try, who is to say that had the war ended differently the world would be worse off? It certainly helped advance the technologies that are all available to us now which I'm sure few of us Slashdotters would object to.
At the end of the day, Americans can't make a car or a any electronic device worth a damn (both the Germans and Japanese do it reasonably well), the bankers have pretty much bankrupted not just the country, but the world (the Germans are bailing out Europe at the moment and the Japanese economy, while slow, isn't doing as badly as some of the others). Germany and Japan have far superior social systems (including healthcare) and better roads... actually, just writing this post I'm beginning to wonder what it would be like if, in an alternative universe, the other side had won.
You are correct here. Did the U.S. government ever apologize for this?
The Catholic Church only recently apologized for the inquisition. Doesn't make it any worse. We might say that ideally it should not have happened in the first place, but then these events shaped the world and we have to wonder what the alternative realities would be had the events occurred differently.
And the Dutch. And the English. And the Spanish. That was a thing of that era.
Brought to the US perhaps, but enslaved? I'm not much of an expert on American history, but I don't even vaguely remember reading about any European slaves.
That's even longer ago. You can't compare our generations with generations centuries ago. If it would not have been for the Catholic Church, no suspected witch would ever have been burned. Same story, same history lesson.
Ah, you've lost me. No witches were burned at Salem, and most of the European witch trials ended in acquittal - which for that period seems oddly favourable!!
I get your point, I really do. But instead of focusing on the negative sides of your country, focus on the positive ones. Every society can be evil. I chose to live in the U.S. because at this point in time I feel that the U.S. is the less evil of all (is that proper grammar?). There are things that I disagree with, like Guantanamo, like Assange, like Manning, like the TSA's groping, but in the end, it's not that bad.
While I share your opinions on this, I've also been avoiding even visiting the US for some of the reasons you've mentioned (and some others you haven't).
I come from a country that's super liberal. I've lived predominantly in other countries that are also relatively liberal. I currently live in a country which is quite conservative (not just politically) and which is run by people apparently even less competent, more corrupt and probably more evil than the US, where I'm subject to a groping not just at airports but any time I enter a mall or movie theatre (yet terrorism still runs rife, so the security measures are even more of a farce than anything the TSA could dream of)...
But, at least I know I won't get shot, tazed or arrested if I open my mouth at a cop (they'd probably miss at point-blank range anyway, the guns are that old)... the worst I'm likely to encounter do is waste 10 hours of my time while I sit at the police station drinking tea and waiting for paperwork to be filled out, stamped in triplicate and then xeroxed enough time
The very nature of the Internet makes this impossible. You couldn't get 10mbit/s to a website in Casablanca, Morocco from Los Angeles, USA because of distances and congestion between the two points on this earth UNLESS you literally go out and buy some kind of IPLC between the two places.
>>>Would you buy a computer that claims 8GB of ram but you could only utilize 3?
That's a software problem - and a stupid manufacturer for including a 32-bit OS on a machine clearly meant for a 64-bit one.
>>>Would you buy a camera that claimed it could take 1000 pictures but only could store 100 maximum?
In this case this would be an "ideal" number used for advertising, but how many cameras are advertised this way?
>>>Would you buy a car that advertised 200 HP but could only output 50 HP?
>>>Would you buy a 3 bedroom house that only has 1.5 bedrooms?
>>>Would you buy a food product with printed 350g on the container but the contents only weigh 180g?
>>>Would you pay for a meal if it claimed it would come with sides that you never received?
>>>Would you buy a gallon of gas if you only got a pint?
>>>Would you buy a 24 pack of beer if you only got 16?
All of these would be examples of fraud.
The lines provided by your ISP are probably capable of the speeds they're advertising, however, this can only remain true when you have under a certain percentage of the users saturating the lines at any given time.
To put it another way, your 200HP car will only use 50HP if there's a lot of congestion on the road, and the ISP is selling their product in a similar fashion: your connection can technically do 20 or 50 or 100mbit/s without any issues BUT if there's a lot of congestion it's going to be slower than that.
Stop right there: Electricity, while "unlimited" (like bandwidth apparently is) is still subject to usage-based billing.
An ISP offering you "unlimited bandwidth" is charging you a flat-rate.
Big. Difference.
The above analogies are complete bullshit.
>>>If I buy a hamburger and fries with a coke at BK, the chuckle-heads behind the counter don't come out and take back ten fries and half the burger.
>>>If I buy a tank of gas the pump guy doesn't follow me around with a hose and siphon back a couple gallons
>>>When I use water the city doesn't ask me to pay for 5 hundred gallons and then say I can only use 4 hundred gallons because 5 hundred would just be too much
In these examples you are buying a finite amount of product.
>>>When I buy cable TV no one stops me from watching TV 24/7 because I might use too much.
This is the only one where you are using a resource in an unlimited fashion - although one could argue that the metrics are entirely different because the channel is not dedicated to you - the cost of the channel/programming is shared between yourself and the million other customers of your cable TV provider. If you got a dedicated channel with dedicated content (and you had to pay the salaries and production costs of the same quality of programming), it'd cost you quite a bit more.
>>>On my land-line I can make non-stop phone calls to Guam and ask the operator there to connect me to Paris and from there to my next-door neighbor and no one complains that I am tying up a line.
Are you on the phone 24x7x365? I didn't think so. And chances are that this is a VOIP call - there are no "lines" to tie up. The rates they charge vs the costs they incur are sufficiently different that making large volumes of calls to countries with low termination rates (like France) doesn't matter, but even then, I'm fairly sure there would be a fair-usage policy attached to your landline.
Clearly you've never tried laying infrastructure. You're forgetting all of the costs associated with civil works and so forth, and these make up a pretty significant portion of the overall costs of laying infrastructure, whereas, contrary to what you claim, the cost of the ONT is actually a fairly small part of the total (by most accounts 15% at most), so, I'd like to know what studies you've been reading, because the ones I've got in my hands indicate that you're looking at the better part of US$2,000 per household if we assume suburban conditions in a first-world country (detached housing, 30m road frontage, 5-15m from the footpath to the door).
Where I'm laying fibre it costs me about US$1,000 for a 48-apartment building BUT this is NOT including the customer equipment (between $50 and $150 depending on the unit) or the civil works (varies by neighbourhood, city & method) or labour... which is only about $50 per apartment but by the time they get service I've still spent over $300 which I then have to recoup - in a third-world country - and so my baseline price for infrastructure is $20 or so per month before I've even delivered any bandwidth, irrespective of speed or usage or equipment in my DC.
And you're also forgetting about OPEX, which, while quite low with fibre, still do exist and have to be accounted for.
Anyway, after all of that, I have to think about bandwidth & distribution. If I contend bandwidth at 50:1 at my network border I'm probably looking at around $40/subscriber (if I offer say 50mbit/s to the end users) but due to the aforementioned contention ratio I can actually only "afford" about 1mbit/s worth of usage (or somewhere around 300GB/month), hence I am forced to implement a fair-usage policy if I'm to keep my prices palatable, and even at these speeds, I'm not going to saturate my PON tree, but frankly, that's the least of my worries.
Now, I will grant you that my bandwidth prices are significantly higher than what I would find in the USA, but, even at $1/mbit for peering bandwidth there are still costs which you're not taking in to account, and I should also like to point out that you're also assuming that every ISP is using FTTH or ready to start building FTTH at an outright cost of $X per subscriber (depending on your location etc) - instead we need to look at what the costs are now given the majority of the world is unfortunately still on DSL or Cable which have a completely different set of overheads.
I think what people (including myself) are trying to point out is that you are *not* paying for a dedicated 50mbit/s pipe. You are paying to share that bandwidth with your neighbours/street/neighbourhood/town.
End of discussion.
Using your logic of the buffet, one could also say that the restaurant would throw you out if you tried to take the entire buffet. What is served there is for everyone in the restaurant, not just your table, and the all-you-can-eat idea is based on the premise that you can only realistically consume so much as a human being. You can not literally sit there 24x7x365 consuming every piece of food the restaurant puts out, so why do you think you should be allowed to do the same with your Internet? Just because your computer can sit there doing something 24x7x365, you as a human being cannot. This is part of the problem, actually.
The kind of usage you're describing (being allowed to saturate your 50mbit/s pipe 24x7) simply would not be considered reasonable - that equates to about... 15TB a month of transfer, which is surprisingly difficult to maintain (tried it) but also is well beyond the realms (at this time) of the average user who probably has 1 or 2TB if they're lucky... it's only us geeks (and businesses and people who *need* large storage arrays) who actually have 4, 8, 16 or more TB at our disposal at the moment. This will change, of course, but as will the ISP offerings.
Anyway, with regards to the use of the word "unlimited", deep down in the recesses of the agreement you'd have signed when you subscribed, the ISP will have a clause somewhere outlining that your usage should be "reasonable" or "fair" (if it's not got a limit that is explicitly defined) and that excessive usage will lead to "traffic management" and so on.
As such, I think that while in some respects you are right in that ISPs should put up or shut up on the promise of "unlimited bandwidth", the simple fact is that truly unlimited bandwidth likely is *not* possible, and it's really the advertising that needs to change, that is to say that basically, no ISP can realistically offer "unlimited bandwidth" these days, period, and the terminology should be replaced.
I personally like "flat-rate" as it refers to pricing, not usage - and with that, we can define the usage as simply being "reasonable" - some ISPs I've seen define this as "up to 5x the average user" (which comes out at anywhere from 100 to 400GB per month depending on the ISP/country/etc) and at the end of the day, if some traffic is zero-rated thanks to peering with [insert streaming service of choice, be it Netflix, Hulu, iSky (NZ), Bigflix (India), Quikflix (Aussie), Youtube etc etc etc] then the worries about crossing some arbitrary bandwidth cap can disappear and become almost irrelevant.
Aussie has numerous cables (4 or 5 not including SxC, soon adding another major cable to Singapore) compared to our 1... Would have been 2, but too many of the folks with money are too pussy to put it up for what was Pacific Fibre and now that's been scrapped. They could/should have *at least* got a pipe going from Auckland or Wellington to Sydney for under 1/4 of the cost to get it started so that NZ ISPs would have a chance at buying bandwidth on the Australian market, but alas... anyway, as a result of the cable competition, the price per megabit is significantly less, resulting in better plan offerings from most of the major ISPs: a 1TB plan is AUD$99 whereas in NZ that same plan is over NZ$300.
So the Netflix guy was kind of right, although, something *can* be done about this: cache the files locally and the costs come down dramatically as the content is served domestically and domestic capacity in NZ is actually reasonably cheap,.. it's just that dastardly SxC's hold on international bandwidth that's killing our country.