I suspect you may be saying this in front of the slashdot crowd at least a little bit tongue-in-cheek.
Bulk road transport is, IMHO, the lowest-hanging fruit for autonomous vehicle projects - more obvious than buses, less so than taxis, but absolutely and completely ubiquitous nonetheless.
Imagine the benefits to business and the global economy of such a gigantic segment of industry becoming almost entirely automated.
Since the beginning of recorded history, humans have needed to move stuff around, whether it be produce, stock feed, building materials, tickle-me-elmo dolls or MIRV'd nuclear warheads.
Prior to this age of autonomous-vehicle-prototypes, tranport has always had human input as the most basic prerequisite for safe and reliable operation.
Although it is hard to predict anything - especially if one is an armchair-expert layperson such as myself - I argue that autonomous transport really is the beginning of a fairly fundamental shift for us as a species, much more so than our first off-world space exploration efforts, for example.
Whilst making human-controlled transport redundant is not necessarily an idea I wholly agree with, it is unlikely the fiscal benefits of autonomous transportation will escape the attention of the corporate beanies for long once the concept becomes mainstream.
As to the end result, I leave that as an exercise for the reader to ponder, because besides the obvious nod in Neal Stephenson's direction, I'm as clueless as the next person when it comes to predicting the future.
Except to suggest, of course, that trucking might not be your best option.. and the future has a habit of catching up with us faster than we'd ever imagined possible.
> If you don't resolve the problems within the Judiciary soon, your wonderful country, its' businesses, and its' great people will all continue to suffer horribly.
FTFY.
We've been at the mercy of a sinister and brutally efficient socialist machine for the last nine years - that's three terms - and like the US with the ol' Bush Baby, we have nobody but ourselves to blame for returning them to power when we should have chosen more wisely.
1. Get a foldable keyboard this way at least you are certain the keyboard doesn't contain a hardware logger in it. That's quite a good idea, especially with most modern machines offering front-USB.
My only concern about this approach is that you kinda have to assume the worst-case-scenario with a box you've only just met. This means assuming the presence of syphili^H^H^H^H^H^H a rootkit. All bets are off.
2 Most software keyloggers are removable with adaware/hijackthis or some other form of spyware checker (usually a free download). Yup, you can squash a great deal of those sort of nasties; the cyber-cafe might even be grateful if they knew you were doing so. Unfortunately in this situation it's of little more than feel-good value - see point 1 above.
3. look up all data on all hardware keyloggers and use the key-codes/-words that disables them. I distinctly remember norton antivirus blocking all internet traffic up receiving some activation-code in any chat or text window containing the words keylogger and readout or something. Nice if you have that handy (perhaps - IMHO I wouldn't trust much to NAV), but again of no help in the face of point 1 above.
4. Dump that bf/gf that's so paranoid that (s)he would spy on you. What's bf/gf? Some sort of secure comms protocol I haven't heard of? Maybe you could tune its paranoia settings in something like/etc/domestic-credit.conf or ~/.shoes?
5. Use a linux-live-cd with ipsec tunnel with the keys burned onto the cd and of course the mozilla password manager to no have to type the passwords, and hope the hardwware-keyloggers' manufacturrers forgot to make it linux compatible. And if they are using hardware keyloggers at least the sofware partner of the hardware keylogger can't spy you display activity. Now that actually sounds plausible assuming a BYO keyboard as you suggest. Perhaps I am a fool to think that most cafe-based identity-theft operations would be limiting themselves to software tricks. Should I assume some form of additional hardware compromise (beyond a keylogger of course), such as might require the opening of the case to fit?
Perhaps I'm blind but I can't see any obvious holes in this strategy.
6. Don't trust public hardware use a mobile (smart)phone or laptop with ipsec tunnel (XO or EEE anyone ?) with a usb-stick containing mozilla-firefox and a password manager so you don't type any online passwords (smile you're on candid spy-cam). Yeah, looks like carrying your own device is the only option really.
7. Whenever on vacation live life to the max and don't use the internet. But.. no net? Not even a friendly returned ping from a cheerful box at home? Gak!
I've been investigating putting together exactly this style of system myself, so your post immediately caught my attention.
Did you use a common open-source framework or was this a custom application you had to develop?
That was just about the best damn critique of the original Lynch movie I have ever read.
I read the book rather than approach the movie first as you did, but I certainly experience the 'memory required to fill in the gaps' feeling you describe when re-visiting the film. I find with movie/book pairs it is often far more enjoyable to watch before reading the story, however with regard to Dune I agree with you that the book is almost a pre-requisite for viewing the movie and it still makes for a broken and disjointed affair.
That said I still find myself regarding the work with a semi-perpetual feeling of awe; it is far and away my favourite sci-fi flick of all time.
However, as another/. reader pointed out with reference to landfill, we're simply stockpiling exactly the materials we have proven to use most regularly. It's not in an immediately-usable form but it is there nonetheless, growing ever more usable as our recycling technologies continue to improve.
I believe the Yucca mountain issue (i.e., the growing pile of nuclear waste in the States) is largely political. If the U.S. decided that reprocessing no longer equals proliferation, or collectively found the risk/reward of doing so reaches a more appealing ratio, all those swimming-pools full of spent rods local to the reactors become partially usable fuel again. With the use of breeders even more potential can be realised.
This of course ignores the important point that reprocessing is a non-trivial operation requiring specialised facilities that likely wouldn't be added to an existing plant for reasons of cost.
That leaves one in the unenviable position of transporting hot poo across the country to your reprocessing plants (the Mobile Chernobyl problem). Perhaps when factoring in this risk it may prove cheaper in the long run to equip each power station than clean up after a disaster.
Still, we need look no further than France, Japan, or the U.K. for a known-good and reasonably safe operational model for managing the entire nuclear fuel cycle.
So because you just happen to have a personal experience with the subject matter of the thread, you'll temporarily suspend your normal intolerant reaction to other people's opinions and graciously allow the conversation to proceed?
> Not to say I want to see it everywhere, but we can't really hold the flaws of ancient hardware > with no current connection to the ISA against it.
Surely though if we are actually *using* the architecture in some capacity we must then be subject to its limitations, the shiny hardware we run this stuff on today notwithstanding?
> Yah, but current ARM processors max out at about 700-900 mhz. > > If they can really pull off a good, stable, low powered chipset in the 1.5 ghz range.. I would be > very interested.
Yeah man, those ARM people must be on crack, vending a CPU in '07 that can barely match the 900Mhz Celeron in my mum's ~2002 PC!
Dave, I have no opinion on subject matter of the exchange between Spun and yourself, but I would like to point out that I found this reply of yours very interesting reading. I feel that you handled things extremely well, showing great restraint and maturity in dealing with what I thought was a fairly stinging personal attack. Your measured response was a breath of fresh air.
As I say, I have no ax to grind or point to make, although I would suggest there may be other slashdot readers out there (besides myself) who might find their arguments are held in higher regard if they were to practice a little of the civility found in your post.
I'm not often found blowing sunshine up anyone's arse and I apologise if this leaves you scratching your head, but I had to say something in this case.
That is an enormously insightful opinion, from where I sit. What an enlightened approach you suggest. The only punitive action needed is the release of the API and the market takes care of the rest. Microsoft work for their dollar again.
I toy with the idea of an alternate universe where Microsoft's NIH syndrome in its early days wasn't such a big part of its culture. Forget roll-your-own, they're after best-of-breed. Kinda like some of their current business strategies. In this reality, they might have taken a functional and mature TCP/IP stack (from say, BSD) and dropped it into Windows early on. I believe it would have certainly clanked a great deal less in its development.
Perhaps I'm being too simplistic but I suggest this approach would have allowed them to focus on their products themselves, rather than re-implementing the wheel the Microsoft way.
Alternate realities aside, your suggestion looks like a good fit for a world that (largely) survives by breathing air from the same vendor.
Mmmm, I'm not sure that deep-sea animals such as this squid are capable of surviving in anything other than extremely deep waters, so my guess would be that it was dead when they netted it.
OK, I'm throwing away an opportunity to throw another log on your '+5 Insightful' fire, but I just had to drop you a quick line to compliment you on the quality of your post. Thank you for a well-referenced, interesting and thought-provoking comment, beautifully executed with flawless spelling and grammar. Perhaps '+5 Made My Day' would be a more appropriate mod!
Rubbish - a corporation with large financial and technical resources such as Microsoft doesn't half-implement a simple OS concept like symlinks because they are simply unable to do it properly.
It's their OS, they know all the dirty little secrets of their code and they can make it happen if they want to. Rather, I suspect it doesn't suit them to have a completed api at present.. in fact I'll even hazard a guess that (unsurprisingly) their motivations in this matter will be less to do with product quality or customer satisfaction and more about whatever FUD campaign is currently coming up to the boil in Redmond.
On the face of it and without local grassroots knowledge, I'd be disgusted with New Zealanders too. As always, there's more to the story however.
Well, having said that I actually am disgusted, because sufficient numbers of New Zealand sheeple have voted twice now in continued support of this kind of madness.
Unfortunately, those of us who prefer adult debate to childish ad-hominem attacks, fiscal responsibility to blatant misappropriation of public funds, etc., are in the minority and effectively up against the wall of a deeply insidious socialist regime.
Sadly, the US does not hold a monopoly on collective stupidity as many of us sometimes like to believe. Our education system is something of a litmus test for the whole New Zealand way of life, which has been systematically de-fanged and hobbled over the years to the point where our incomprehensible stupidity manages to make it to Slashdot (to my shame, I might add).
My optimism for the future is also very shaky. I shudder when considering the human garbage rolling out of the New Zealand educational system each and every year; blank-faced dullards with little comprehension or interest in the world around them, partially literate at best and even lacking enough basic arithmatic to make a rough guess at how much change they should expect back from the shopkeeper!
Don't write this off as hyperbole either, I can personally name a dozen kids up to the age of fifteen who can't tell the time from an analogue clock! Kids without even the skills to look up an address in the phonebook!
More and more I am finding that these are the class of morons served up by recruitment agencies, leaving employers sifting through piles of cruft to find the one golden person capable of crafting a coherent e-mail without needing babysitting!
If the kids aren't being educated by their educators or parented by their parents, how can we hope to hold our own on the world stage?
Ugh, I wouldn't hold out much hope of New Zealand being a viable option for very long.. we're enjoying our own version of 1984 down here thanks to the concerted efforts of a tight group of academic idealist socialists running the country.
Most impressive of all is the almost total media blackout the New Zealand Labour Party has managed to impose, whereby the activities of the other parties and most notably the main Opposition party somehow manage to evade coverage. Other than paid-for advertising, the other parties essentially fall off the face of the planet during the run-up to the election.
Just recently there's been a bit of a stink about improper spending by all parties in the last election. Labour's overspending was by far the greatest by a factor of 10 over the next largest overspender. The Opposition and the minor parties mostly agreed to stump up to repay the improper expenditure, with the funds coming directly from MPs salaries, believe it or not.
Labour's response? Why, they simply pushed an 'emergency resolution' through to make future overspending lawful, then applied it retroactively to let themselves off the hook. Genius, really.
This is Labour's third term and they'll likely be handed the keys again in the next election, certainly in part due to the remarkable control they appear to have over the New Zealand media.
An old quote that seems appropriate: "Not to be a socialist at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head." -Georges Clemenceau
An interesting point, however I would like to raise another with regard to the Indian technology institutes.
As I understand it, only the very best actually make it to a tech institute, with much fiercer competition than occurs elsewhere in the world (with the possible exception of Japan). Therefore only the very very best, the creme-de-la-creme make it out with a qual at the end of their study term.
In short, we're talking about a system fine-tuned for distilling the very finest minds out of a nation of over a billion hungry, competitive people, prepared to fight almost to the death to get ahead of their peers and snap up the high-tech jobs available in, say, the States.
Perhaps I'm out of date, but IIRR people like Jim Clark (Silicon Graphics, Netscape, Healtheon) were always going on about wanting more Indian workers - they recognised the value of having the elite of the elite working for them.
The hungry, highly motivated and eager-to-please Indian immigrants certainly stack up well against the less driven nationals they compete alongside.
My last employ was an Indian immigrant and I struggled to find anyone with even half as good an attitude or level of aptitude as her in any of the local offerings.
I realise this is not always the case but I do hold a great deal of respect for people who can rise up and shine out of such an enormous pool of talent.
One might also argue that one of Google's strongest points of distinction is the inherent guarantee of unbiased search results.
They take in advertising dollars, sure, but they'll never risk their online credibility by allowing ad revenues to corrupt the sanctity of their results.
Microsoft's search technologies on the other hand.. well, I may not be 100% convinced by MSN's anecdotal leaning towards IIS servers, but I'm certainly skeptical of that engine's inclination towards unbiased search results.
No thinking person will ever take MSN Search half as seriously as Google if they can't trust the results. Granted, this will be of little consequence to the remaining 99.8% of the world..
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect you may be saying this in front of the slashdot crowd at least a little bit tongue-in-cheek.
Bulk road transport is, IMHO, the lowest-hanging fruit for autonomous vehicle projects - more obvious than buses, less so than taxis, but absolutely and completely ubiquitous nonetheless.
Imagine the benefits to business and the global economy of such a gigantic segment of industry becoming almost entirely automated.
Since the beginning of recorded history, humans have needed to move stuff around, whether it be produce, stock feed, building materials, tickle-me-elmo dolls or MIRV'd nuclear warheads.
Prior to this age of autonomous-vehicle-prototypes, tranport has always had human input as the most basic prerequisite for safe and reliable operation.
Although it is hard to predict anything - especially if one is an armchair-expert layperson such as myself - I argue that autonomous transport really is the beginning of a fairly fundamental shift for us as a species, much more so than our first off-world space exploration efforts, for example.
Whilst making human-controlled transport redundant is not necessarily an idea I wholly agree with, it is unlikely the fiscal benefits of autonomous transportation will escape the attention of the corporate beanies for long once the concept becomes mainstream.
As to the end result, I leave that as an exercise for the reader to ponder, because besides the obvious nod in Neal Stephenson's direction, I'm as clueless as the next person when it comes to predicting the future.
Except to suggest, of course, that trucking might not be your best option.. and the future has a habit of catching up with us faster than we'd ever imagined possible.
Ooh lookie! Dubya just joined the conversation!
> If you don't resolve the problems within the Judiciary soon, your wonderful country, its' businesses, and its' great people will all continue to suffer horribly.
FTFY.
We've been at the mercy of a sinister and brutally efficient socialist machine for the last nine years - that's three terms - and like the US with the ol' Bush Baby, we have nobody but ourselves to blame for returning them to power when we should have chosen more wisely.
Mod parent up. For those of us outside of the US it's easy to miss the subtlety within Jeremiah's post.
Nice response, BTW.
Cue the Grammar Nazis pointing out your spelling of 'pwned' is in direct violation of the Slashdot Groupthink Morality Code in 5, 4, 3...
My only concern about this approach is that you kinda have to assume the worst-case-scenario with a box you've only just met. This means assuming the presence of syphili^H^H^H^H^H^H a rootkit. All bets are off.
2 Most software keyloggers are removable with adaware/hijackthis or some other form of spyware checker (usually a free download). Yup, you can squash a great deal of those sort of nasties; the cyber-cafe might even be grateful if they knew you were doing so. Unfortunately in this situation it's of little more than feel-good value - see point 1 above.
3. look up all data on all hardware keyloggers and use the key-codes/-words that disables them. I distinctly remember norton antivirus blocking all internet traffic up receiving some activation-code in any chat or text window containing the words keylogger and readout or something. Nice if you have that handy (perhaps - IMHO I wouldn't trust much to NAV), but again of no help in the face of point 1 above.
4. Dump that bf/gf that's so paranoid that (s)he would spy on you. What's bf/gf? Some sort of secure comms protocol I haven't heard of? Maybe you could tune its paranoia settings in something like
5. Use a linux-live-cd with ipsec tunnel with the keys burned onto the cd and of course the mozilla password manager to no have to type the passwords, and hope the hardwware-keyloggers' manufacturrers forgot to make it linux compatible. And if they are using hardware keyloggers at least the sofware partner of the hardware keylogger can't spy you display activity. Now that actually sounds plausible assuming a BYO keyboard as you suggest. Perhaps I am a fool to think that most cafe-based identity-theft operations would be limiting themselves to software tricks. Should I assume some form of additional hardware compromise (beyond a keylogger of course), such as might require the opening of the case to fit?
Perhaps I'm blind but I can't see any obvious holes in this strategy.
6. Don't trust public hardware use a mobile (smart)phone or laptop with ipsec tunnel (XO or EEE anyone ?) with a usb-stick containing mozilla-firefox and a password manager so you don't type any online passwords (smile you're on candid spy-cam). Yeah, looks like carrying your own device is the only option really.
7. Whenever on vacation live life to the max and don't use the internet. But.. no net? Not even a friendly returned ping from a cheerful box at home? Gak!
That sounds pretty robust!
I've been investigating putting together exactly this style of system myself, so your post immediately caught my attention. Did you use a common open-source framework or was this a custom application you had to develop?
Thanks!
That was just about the best damn critique of the original Lynch movie I have ever read.
I read the book rather than approach the movie first as you did, but I certainly experience the 'memory required to fill in the gaps' feeling you describe when re-visiting the film. I find with movie/book pairs it is often far more enjoyable to watch before reading the story, however with regard to Dune I agree with you that the book is almost a pre-requisite for viewing the movie and it still makes for a broken and disjointed affair.
That said I still find myself regarding the work with a semi-perpetual feeling of awe; it is far and away my favourite sci-fi flick of all time.
Yeah, I thought it was madness too - but then, this is the U.S. Military...
Atomic Annie: http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoID=671679195
Excellent point.
/. reader pointed out with reference to landfill, we're simply stockpiling exactly the materials we have proven to use most regularly. It's not in an immediately-usable form but it is there nonetheless, growing ever more usable as our recycling technologies continue to improve.
However, as another
I believe the Yucca mountain issue (i.e., the growing pile of nuclear waste in the States) is largely political. If the U.S. decided that reprocessing no longer equals proliferation, or collectively found the risk/reward of doing so reaches a more appealing ratio, all those swimming-pools full of spent rods local to the reactors become partially usable fuel again. With the use of breeders even more potential can be realised.
This of course ignores the important point that reprocessing is a non-trivial operation requiring specialised facilities that likely wouldn't be added to an existing plant for reasons of cost.
That leaves one in the unenviable position of transporting hot poo across the country to your reprocessing plants (the Mobile Chernobyl problem). Perhaps when factoring in this risk it may prove cheaper in the long run to equip each power station than clean up after a disaster.
Still, we need look no further than France, Japan, or the U.K. for a known-good and reasonably safe operational model for managing the entire nuclear fuel cycle.
The DCS http://www.srs.gov/general/srs-home.html Savannah River http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOX_fuel MOX project may even make this a reality; my guess is it'll be down to how the public receive the finished plant.
So because you just happen to have a personal experience with the subject matter of the thread, you'll temporarily suspend your normal intolerant reaction to other people's opinions and graciously allow the conversation to proceed?
How generous of you.
> Not to say I want to see it everywhere, but we can't really hold the flaws of ancient hardware
> with no current connection to the ISA against it.
Surely though if we are actually *using* the architecture in some capacity we must then be subject to its limitations, the shiny hardware we run this stuff on today notwithstanding?
> Yah, but current ARM processors max out at about 700-900 mhz.
>
> If they can really pull off a good, stable, low powered chipset in the 1.5 ghz range.. I would be
> very interested.
Yeah man, those ARM people must be on crack, vending a CPU in '07 that can barely match the 900Mhz Celeron in my mum's ~2002 PC!
oh wait..
Dave, I have no opinion on subject matter of the exchange between Spun and yourself, but I would like to point out that I found this reply of yours very interesting reading. I feel that you handled things extremely well, showing great restraint and maturity in dealing with what I thought was a fairly stinging personal attack. Your measured response was a breath of fresh air.
As I say, I have no ax to grind or point to make, although I would suggest there may be other slashdot readers out there (besides myself) who might find their arguments are held in higher regard if they were to practice a little of the civility found in your post.
I'm not often found blowing sunshine up anyone's arse and I apologise if this leaves you scratching your head, but I had to say something in this case.
That is an enormously insightful opinion, from where I sit. What an enlightened approach you suggest. The only punitive action needed is the release of the API and the market takes care of the rest. Microsoft work for their dollar again.
I toy with the idea of an alternate universe where Microsoft's NIH syndrome in its early days wasn't such a big part of its culture. Forget roll-your-own, they're after best-of-breed. Kinda like some of their current business strategies. In this reality, they might have taken a functional and mature TCP/IP stack (from say, BSD) and dropped it into Windows early on. I believe it would have certainly clanked a great deal less in its development.
Perhaps I'm being too simplistic but I suggest this approach would have allowed them to focus on their products themselves, rather than re-implementing the wheel the Microsoft way.
Alternate realities aside, your suggestion looks like a good fit for a world that (largely) survives by breathing air from the same vendor.
Mmmm, I'm not sure that deep-sea animals such as this squid are capable of surviving in anything other than extremely deep waters, so my guess would be that it was dead when they netted it.
OK, I'm throwing away an opportunity to throw another log on your '+5 Insightful' fire, but I just had to drop you a quick line to compliment you on the quality of your post. Thank you for a well-referenced, interesting and thought-provoking comment, beautifully executed with flawless spelling and grammar. Perhaps '+5 Made My Day' would be a more appropriate mod!
>But faint traces like a dogs do [note the significant absence of the apostrophe after the s in dogs]
Correct spelling, proper use of grammar *AND* a demonstration of robust apostrophe fu..?
You must be new here.
Ok, so going by your sig, which category do you fall into, Fool or Troll?
Rubbish - a corporation with large financial and technical resources such as Microsoft doesn't half-implement a simple OS concept like symlinks because they are simply unable to do it properly.
It's their OS, they know all the dirty little secrets of their code and they can make it happen if they want to. Rather, I suspect it doesn't suit them to have a completed api at present.. in fact I'll even hazard a guess that (unsurprisingly) their motivations in this matter will be less to do with product quality or customer satisfaction and more about whatever FUD campaign is currently coming up to the boil in Redmond.
On the face of it and without local grassroots knowledge, I'd be disgusted with New Zealanders too. As always, there's more to the story however.
Well, having said that I actually am disgusted, because sufficient numbers of New Zealand sheeple have voted twice now in continued support of this kind of madness.
Unfortunately, those of us who prefer adult debate to childish ad-hominem attacks, fiscal responsibility to blatant misappropriation of public funds, etc., are in the minority and effectively up against the wall of a deeply insidious socialist regime.
Sadly, the US does not hold a monopoly on collective stupidity as many of us sometimes like to believe. Our education system is something of a litmus test for the whole New Zealand way of life, which has been systematically de-fanged and hobbled over the years to the point where our incomprehensible stupidity manages to make it to Slashdot (to my shame, I might add).
My optimism for the future is also very shaky. I shudder when considering the human garbage rolling out of the New Zealand educational system each and every year; blank-faced dullards with little comprehension or interest in the world around them, partially literate at best and even lacking enough basic arithmatic to make a rough guess at how much change they should expect back from the shopkeeper!
Don't write this off as hyperbole either, I can personally name a dozen kids up to the age of fifteen who can't tell the time from an analogue clock! Kids without even the skills to look up an address in the phonebook!
More and more I am finding that these are the class of morons served up by recruitment agencies, leaving employers sifting through piles of cruft to find the one golden person capable of crafting a coherent e-mail without needing babysitting!
If the kids aren't being educated by their educators or parented by their parents, how can we hope to hold our own on the world stage?
Ugh, I wouldn't hold out much hope of New Zealand being a viable option for very long.. we're enjoying our own version of 1984 down here thanks to the concerted efforts of a tight group of academic idealist socialists running the country.
Most impressive of all is the almost total media blackout the New Zealand Labour Party has managed to impose, whereby the activities of the other parties and most notably the main Opposition party somehow manage to evade coverage. Other than paid-for advertising, the other parties essentially fall off the face of the planet during the run-up to the election.
Just recently there's been a bit of a stink about improper spending by all parties in the last election. Labour's overspending was by far the greatest by a factor of 10 over the next largest overspender. The Opposition and the minor parties mostly agreed to stump up to repay the improper expenditure, with the funds coming directly from MPs salaries, believe it or not.
Labour's response? Why, they simply pushed an 'emergency resolution' through to make future overspending lawful, then applied it retroactively to let themselves off the hook. Genius, really.
This is Labour's third term and they'll likely be handed the keys again in the next election, certainly in part due to the remarkable control they appear to have over the New Zealand media.
An old quote that seems appropriate: "Not to be a socialist at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head." -Georges Clemenceau
Hats off to them, indeed.
This is important work and near to the hearts of many of us. How would one best support these fine people?
An interesting point, however I would like to raise another with regard to the Indian technology institutes.
As I understand it, only the very best actually make it to a tech institute, with much fiercer competition than occurs elsewhere in the world (with the possible exception of Japan). Therefore only the very very best, the creme-de-la-creme make it out with a qual at the end of their study term.
In short, we're talking about a system fine-tuned for distilling the very finest minds out of a nation of over a billion hungry, competitive people, prepared to fight almost to the death to get ahead of their peers and snap up the high-tech jobs available in, say, the States.
Perhaps I'm out of date, but IIRR people like Jim Clark (Silicon Graphics, Netscape, Healtheon) were always going on about wanting more Indian workers - they recognised the value of having the elite of the elite working for them.
The hungry, highly motivated and eager-to-please Indian immigrants certainly stack up well against the less driven nationals they compete alongside.
My last employ was an Indian immigrant and I struggled to find anyone with even half as good an attitude or level of aptitude as her in any of the local offerings.
I realise this is not always the case but I do hold a great deal of respect for people who can rise up and shine out of such an enormous pool of talent.
Indeed.
One might also argue that one of Google's strongest points of distinction is the inherent guarantee of unbiased search results.
They take in advertising dollars, sure, but they'll never risk their online credibility by allowing ad revenues to corrupt the sanctity of their results.
Microsoft's search technologies on the other hand.. well, I may not be 100% convinced by MSN's anecdotal leaning towards IIS servers, but I'm certainly skeptical of that engine's inclination towards unbiased search results.
No thinking person will ever take MSN Search half as seriously as Google if they can't trust the results. Granted, this will be of little consequence to the remaining 99.8% of the world..