...before someone mentioned toilets or the lack of them, but nooooo. Think of India and the first thing that Slashdotters think of is toilets and then cows. Or is it cows and then toilets?

Absolutely true. If you see how clunky Visual Studio and the new versions of XCode are (Xcode = 2.x was such an awesome IDE), and then use QtCreator, you are never going to go back to anything else. I find it surprising how hard it is for me to convince any of my colleagues to give it a try. In addition to the shame that people associate it to be something used only for Qt, is the shame that Qt itself is thought of as only a GUI. QtCore and QtNetwork make non-Qt applications a breeze to code in C++.

I don't know if you meant to troll, but an answer is Yes!

Only, worse. Since telemarketers probably don't bother creating a FB page. So FB won't notify you of that. TrueCaller gathers information by uploading your contacts list to their servers. And doing the same from millions of people who use. Is this a crazy breach of privacy - sure, it is - but so is everything about Facebook. Telemarketers hate it since once a few of report it as a spam call, it shows up with a warning saying as much when the same person calls someone else. Oh, and you can block that number too.

I am sure you are going to get a series of comments denouncing Qt, most of them ignorant of the current state of things, most of them coming from script kiddies who find anything to do with C++ frightening. Whether Qt would be ideal for what you call a native app depends on what you are emphasizing with the word 'native'. If the emphasis is on 'native'-look and feel, then it might or might not suit your needs. QtGui module sure lets you create GUIs with native controls, however the QtQuick module is where all the awesomeness is at. Using QtQuick, one can write an entire application with a beautiful declarative UI mark up language, that brought everything that the ReactJS people did, only 5 years ago, but then the GUI does not 'look' native, even though it will be a 'native' application. However, when the emphasis is on native application like performance, Qt is THE tool for the job. Add to that the fact that QtCore gives you really useful tools (signals and slots), and OS agnostic threading, QtNetwork gives you OS agnostic sockets and all of the above work identically (on Linux/Mac/Windows/iOS/Android - seriously), Qt is the choicest tool for 'native' cross platform development. So let the script kiddies whine, while I just push a commit and watch an automated build run for 5 platforms all at once without paying a cent for any API licensing.

...welcome our new female overlords

Everyday I see the following scenario: researchers conduct an experiment that might show possible correlation between A and B, but like good scientists, provide adequate riders and caveats. Some eager reporter from a leading daily reads the synopsis and puts out a story screaming "People! You have GOT to try taking copious amounts of A! I will do a whole lot of B for you!!"

And UBER is expected to do this for all the drivers that register with them? Do you understand their business model at all? Anyone who actually lives in India, will have far less faith in the efficacy of getting the police here to do anything. Consider that this guy is a serial offender and they weren't able to get a proper conviction for over a decade!

Oh believe me when I say that the real costs accumalate AFTER getting to the police station. Try getting these guys to do ANYTHING without... um... "encouragement".

Yes, the fact that my country's law enforcement and judiciary are so weak is deplorable indeed. I will probably take another 20 years or so before he is finally convicted (post all the appeals he is eligible for).

There is no such number they can call. The Police does not provide any such facilities or have an operator ready to answer your queries as to whether a certificate they have issued is genuine. Finally, if you are of the opinion that they ought to send a guy over to the village Police station where the certificate was issued, for every driver who signs up, then you are either not an Indian and have no idea of how things look like here or you are utterly deluded and probably DO need some ganj to soothe your nerves.

The facts have been misrepresented in this case both in the Indian media and now in the U.S press. UBER did indeed ask for a police certified character certificate from the driver and the driver in turn handed them one, albeit a forged certificate. Any Indian who has worked with security agencies will tell you that Indian police character verification certificate is simply expensive paper to wipe your ass with. They have no standard format, are easily faked and are expensive to obtain no matter whom you pay - the crooks in uniform who give you one for a bribe or the crooks not in uniform who make forged copies for a fee. There is no central verification database which companies can use to authenticate one of these certificates. How then was UBER supposed to figure out that the certificate he handed them was a forged one? UBER is a boon for middle class Indians who are otherwise at the mercy of corrupt autorickshaw drivers who have no fixed metering and fleece customers based on the hour. Also, there is atleast some sort of traceability in a cab. Had the victim been raped by an autorickshaw driver, the case would still be unsolved: just another file in a mountain of open rape cases that the Indian police is too incompetent to deal with. What happened to her was terrible, but she is being an opportunist here. This is less about ushering in accountability from UBER than it is about squeezing UBER for every penny she can. It saddens me that a fellow Indian would resort to this.

I am an Indian and I don't give a fuck about whether it was an Indian that wrote down the first comprehensive statement of the Pythagorean theorem. The theorem would be as profound irrespective of where it originated. I am sick of my country's politicians gloating over an imaginary past full of glory to make up for the utter shambles that Indian science has been in over the past 50 years. I wonder if any these morons can even complete a Pythagorean triplet given the two of the numbers in one. Indian politicians boasting about imaginary science of the past is our version of buying a slick sports car to compensate for some of our insecurities.

... there is a fancy new project planning paradigm that the suits want to flog. "Move over Agile, just Dive right in!" But no! These are people who are really diving into the sea. They mean scuba gear and skin suits and the like. And they are doing it so often apparently that they need a software to keep track of it all. Wow!

Governments everywhere in the world demanding or assuming massive surveillance powers to employ a massive dragnet on communications of their own citizens are lying if they say they are doing it to protect them against enemies of the state. Enemies of the state who actually are interested in subversion are already using a 2048-bit PGP encryption, and then embedding the encrypted text using steganography in an image of Santa Claus on his sleigh flying over snowy hills and sending that as a season's greeting email. The government is never going to break the encryption even if Santa Claus left the self portrait in a stocking over the defense/home ministry's fireplace. The people that they really are targeting are you and me - ordinary people on whom they want leverage, just in case we turn troublemakers.