I, on the other hand, have had a mixed experience with Indian workers.

I worked on one team with 3 of them. One was female, the other two male. One of the males had a good business head and presentation and passable technical skills. The other fellow was out of his depth and was compensating by trying to talk over everyone. The gal was the smartest of the lot and new her stuff (the QC side of things) better than either of the male devs, but their cultural propensity to just marginalize or ignore the female (or try to speak for her) meant the best way to let her excel was to arrange interactions with her that did not involve the two indian males.

On another project I worked on, offshoring a code base for a major US Telco, I will tell you that there were some smart devs (they got what I was presenting) and there were others who struggled and I don't think ever did fathom the complex code.

Frankly, the Russians I worked with were better as far as offshore resources go - thorough, smart, logical, didn't try to claim what they didn't actually know and figured out a lot of things as required (and did a good job of being thorough).

I think the only two objections I have overall (as a generalization) to Indian workers are a) tendency to be patriarchal and not listen to and respect females and b) a tendency to say yes to everything when it comes to 'can you do X by time Y?' even if the thing they are agreeing to do is well beyond them. They can't seem to say no or it'll take longer. Everything is yes. We learned that we could not depend on any time estimates and routinely doubled their estimates and sometimes even then had to get in and solve the problems ourselves.

Any group of devs is going to reflect the amount and nature of their education and their cultural perspectives. Being Canadian, I've had some good fortune to work in very diverse settings with many cultural groups and nationalities. As long as you know who you are dealing with and allow for that, you can work well together.

In the case of IT work, the skillset required for broader business aspects of that field require a broad knowledge of many technologies, a broad knowledge of business practices, and the business to treat the IT staff less like a cost center and more like a critical piece of infrastructure - provide training, support sufficient time for projects and manpower resources, and to generally not try to get the IT staff to be responsible for everything, all of the time, in all respects, with few or no resources. That's the most common failing in IT departments - how companies see them as an expense and try to minimize that to the detriment of employee quality and their overall business in the long run.

I was under the impression sometimes a second marshal may fly on a flight without notifying staff.

Yes, they are armed. That is their purpose - to be a last line of defense for major threats and to be an early-responder to unruly passenger scenarios.

They are also well trained.

I'm afraid I have worked with Flash. If it is the solution, then you have an apocalyptic problem. I'd rather nail my head to a coffee table than ever have to work with Flash again.

If Google keeled over today, my email and docs would be a loss.

I have some of the docs backed up locally, but not all (got used to using the cloud, don't know an easy full-google-docs backup tech). If email went guts up... argh. I do try to pull the mail archive periodically, but it is absolutely huge now. Beyond that, if I lose tagging - very likely in an export/import to different tool scenaro - then I lose a massive amount of organization that helps me find individual collections of email in 15 years worth of heavy email traffic.

This is my biggest issue with these services - even if you can get the data out, you might not get all of it and some of the metadata (organizing data) might no longer be useful/available.

I'd really love to see more open standards in use for both the downloading of all of this sort of stuff but also being able to reuse it in a new product if there was a need. But Google doesn't want you to do that, really.

Boxee hasn't had an update in forever because after they were bought, the Dev team was re-vectored. So some things that really should be fixed aren't and some things that could have been added now never will be. It *is* my TV source, so I will miss it when Netflix finally ceases to work or something comes along that means I have to get another box.

Really, it would be nice to see people develop these sorts of products with an idea to them having longevity, but no hardware manufacturer wants that.

Even content they are now trying to LICENSE to us for a time and in a particular format, rather than simply selling us the work to own (like books and games used to be) and that's a ridiculous model in my mind.

DRM-servers for many products will eventually go silent then everyone wanting to revisit old nostalgic movies and books will have to buy them again in some new format from a new provider. (legally, of course there are other non-legal options)

Do you call your Linux "Flash"?

(sorry, your username made that joke inevitable).

But I run it all:
5 licenses of XP Pro SP3 (old laptop, main desktop, netbook, older desktop, something I'm forgetting),
1 license Win 7 Home Premium (new laptop, to avoid win8 atrocity),
1 license Vista Business (argh),
1 Xubuntu install (small file server/dev box),
1 Ubuntu install (old laptop),
1 Boxee Box (linux),
1 WAP (linux),
Android 4.3 Tablet (nexus 7),
Android 4.4 Phone (nexus 4),
Android 4.1 Tablet (asus transformer prime),
1 Win95 box (older desktop),
1 WinNT 4.0 box (older desktop),

One of these once had a triple boot with XP or 95 alongside OS/2 2.1 and Yggdrasil Linux....

I'd love to migrate my XP boxes to Win 7 but Win 7 pricing is *still* stupid. And I'm vague on whether the laptop and even the desktops would have full drivers for all of the older stuff. Win 8+ is an atrocity - I can't say how much I hate METRO. Even in XP, I switched to the classic NT look.

Because of my disdain for Metro and Win 8, I may well end up with more Linux boxes. Ubuntu or Xubuntu, although a BSD might be tempting too. I've used RHEL at work and it isn't bad either.

My issue is I have so much software from small producers that I like that only runs on XP (and some of it actually requires kernel hacks - one DB fix in particular - that I am unconvinced will work on a virtualization platform) that I feel I'll have to keep some XP boxes up and running.

I rather hate the fact that I need nothing (except security updates) from Win7 or Win8 and once again I've had to relearn where all the admin tools are and so on (just like every Windows release) and I'm going to have to rebuy a bunch of apps that cost $$$ that work fine for me on XP on the new platform for no increase in utility.

Ubuntu is good and the apps are okay, but honestly they just don't match up to what the MS office apps (for instance) can do. I've tried libre office, star office, and a number of other products. They just aren't as easy to use nor as capable as MS products IMO.

The only compelling reasons to migrate forward are professional experience with the new OSes (most like teeth pulling) and security (given XP security updates are coming to an end... you'd have thought MS could out source this and charge some $ to keep security updates coming for a few more years, but they want you to migrate.

But being on Linux is no protection from changes of a major nature (Unity appearing in Ubuntu as one example). Every platform, even the free ones, if you want to keep up with current levels of software for compatibility and security, you have to take all the other UI changes, repackagings, deprecations, and additions. It's the miserable cost of staying current.

No, I'm not a luddite. I just know that XP gave me functionally pretty much everything I've needed as a professional, small office user, and heavy internet user/developer. Security could have been better (no doubt), but the truth is what Win7 and WIn8 have added has been of little utility to me and therefore is primarily an annoyance. And Chromebook sure isn't a substitute, nor is MacOS.

....and something went horribly wrong....

TCP is transport layer. IP is not. (at least by the OSI model and I think the TCP model though I'm a bit rustier on that one - Network layer is IP)

There is no reason to imagine TCP/IP could not have included Session or higher level encryption protocols without really affecting the TCP or IP parts of the protocol stack. The design could well have been exactly as you suggest.

Someone uses it and the bugs get identified and resolved.

Every solid release came from buggy prototypes.

You could encrypt content. That's something and the content could have been secure.

You are correct that encrypting routing encapsulation would be a whole other ball of wax, so who transactions were between may not have been protected.

Content would at least have been more private than it is today (until NSA used a big lever on hardware and software producers anyway).

The Internet was NEVER owned by no one.

It isn't a magic kingdom. It's hosted on servers and backbones that were *always* owned by someone(s). So the 'free as a bird' perspective is just blatant fantasy.

The earliest Internet tech was developed for DARPA/USGOV. It also appeared around the same time in academic uses. Neither of these was 'free' nor 'uncontrolled'.

It may have been not heavily policed in the early days, because nothing much of general public interest (or interest to the movers and shakers) was happening on the limited public Internet, but it sure as heck was all owned by someone.

I don't find it a stretch at all that engineers didn't consider encrypting for privacy and security at the start. It may not have been practical (either given public domain cryptosystems or hardware) but it may have been conceptually considered.

You send 3N of each type. (Of course, I am cherry picking - this assumes high (95-98%+ reliability) vessels and then 3 is the magic number for maximum redundancy I believe)

I'd send more than one type and more than one of each type. In fact, I'd figure out what my mission needs and dispatch 3 concurrently to the same place with minor separation (enough for something to happen to the first and another may avoid their fate or come in to save them).

Colonization is such a ludicrously big venture, it should be done on a big scale. By that point, Earth may well have a population of 9-13 Bn, so we can certainly spare about 120,000.

Whether we can beat the energy or resource limits is another issue entirely.

You do realize menstrual cycles all align with women on warships?

Can you just imagine what the colony would be like for several days out of every month?

And no men and you expect the them, over 300 years, to maintain a reasonable society that new folks would want to be born into? Not slagging women, just saying you are creating a gender imbalance in live population that cannot fail to have profound psychological and then cultural consequences.

This plan is a bad one.