Oh, don't worry. No Indian wants 'free trade' with the US or any other country either. That kind of 'free trade' is what the East India Company did with India a few hundred years ago, leading to the theft of much of India's wealth that the UK built itself on.

Do you really think India cannot reciprocate? All it takes is to stop buying American defence hardware and go back to other sources.

India's baseline energy requirements are growing rapidly. To the extent that India is unable to produce and transport coal fast enough during peak demand periods.

Nuclear plants take a decade or more to build. That is if land can be acquired and Western-financed environmental NGOs don't hold up projects in courts for years if not decades. They still won't come anywhere near the scale that India requires.

The country is also deploying renewables wherever possible, at a pace faster than most Western countries. That still isn't enough. So, to ensure that India's rapidly increasing energy needs are met, coal it will have to be.

"countries like India cannot create the electrical infrastructure needed to support batteries"

Eh? Where did you get that from about India?

https://powermin.gov.in/en/con...

You couldn't even get your history right before rambling on?

The trainloads of dead people were among those trying to flee one country for another in 1947, not in 'late 1950s or 1960s'. This was when India was partitioned by the British, much against the wishes of much of India, into 3 pieces.

Try and split your country into 3 on religious or ethnic lines and let me know how things work out. The two pieces that split from India and became the country called Pakistan had another massive conflict just two decades later. Pakistan butchered hundreds of thousands of 'East Pakistan' citizens, aided and abetted by the US.

Look up The Blood Telegram. Millions died as Pakistan again split into the current-day Pakistan and Bangladesh, formerly known as East Pakistan.

As for rape, clearly you have not seen the endless outrage in India over such cases. To the extent that there are strident demands in India to execute rapists. There is a lot to be done but rape statistics in India are not far from the global norm.

45 degrees Celsius, not 60. Of course, surface temperatures for some materials or roads and roofs may go up to that level. But the ambient temperature in the Hyderabad area rarely goes above 45. Doubt if there is anywhere in India with 60-degree temperatures.

India is trying to build the entire ecosystem. The idea is to use drones for saving costs in agriculture, in the transport of supplies to rural areas, etc. And then, of course, there are the higher-value areas like defence.

All of this cannot happen at once. The idea is to first encourage the private sector through incentives to build large assembly and basic production facilities. Then gradually move upwards to produce the more complex components. Imported components will always remain in one form or another. But the country will ensure that it has the capability to build them if it should need to.

India pumps out less than a third of the US's CO2 emissions and less than a fourth of China's. Per capita, India's CO2 emissions are 1/8th of the US. A 10% decline in India's emissions will be worth less than a 5% reduction by the US. Climate change due to CO2 emissions does not respect political borders. So even if India committed to net zero in the next six months, it wouldn't make a difference unless everyone else does the same thing.

The heavy lifting has to come from places like the US and China. Both are behind on their Paris agreements. India is not. Look it up.

Many morons continue to post as Anons. Yes, that still happens.

Backlash on slashdot was inevitable, and that is perhaps a good thing. Thankfully, people who care about privacy and freedom still exist.

But here's the thing: Where I live, to get a phone (by which I really mean a SIM), prepaid or postpaid, requires submission of documents with ID proof, address proof,, etc. The telco carries out verification and only when all conditions are met are SIMs given out and the connections activated. It hasn't really hurt anyone and has made sure that any phone used for any terrorist activity can be traced back to some address.

My country has been hit by terrorism long before US or Europe were. And regularly. Mobiles made communication much easier for the perpetrators, enabled them to hide better. So the govt put in place these rules, found gaps, closed them, and so on over the course of a decade. You even have to show ID in cybercafes here, and name, address and phone numbers are recorded by the cafe owner should they be required later for investigation.

Today, it is mighty tough to get a phone fraudulently. Phones can be stolen. But stolen phones can quickly be blocked too. All you have to do is inform the telco. You could use fraudulent ID and address proofs, but then, verification would hold your connection up. Or getting verification marked successful will require the connivance of multiple people. All of this raises the degree of difficulty to acquire a so--called 'burner' connection.

Having lived in this regime for so long, I don't really see it as a big issue. You don't switch between operators regularly and so there should be no need to go through the rigmarole all that much. What the US seems to be proposing is in fact quite lax compared to here in India.

It is tradition. Like NASA's 'lucky peanuts'. Infact, NASA has sent some over to ISRO for passing around during the launch.

It looks like we already have FTL communications, much faster in fact. Anything sent on 4/1 in the US arrives in Europe on 2/4!

A legal framework is needed to separate R&D in pharma from manufacturing and marketing. The R&D companies license the drug to whoever applies. Competition will keep the marketing and production company costs down to an optimal level thus saving money. Pharma marketing has massive budgets. I know of doctors travelling abroad every 15-20 days for lavish Pharma sponsored 'conferences' in exotic locations. Many malpractices exist in the whole Pharma marketing ecosystem that put the IT industry to shame in their sheer scale and audacity. Curbing them will definitely cut costs.

On the other hand, pharma R&D will make its money solely from creating new drugs and licensing fees. Their primary incentive will be to keep revenues flowing from licensing, therefore creating new drugs rapidly. The only issue to be resolved is the licensing fee R&D can charge for each new drug. I am sure a proper regulatory framework can come up with something that ensures good incentives for companies doing R&D, keeping net returns well above the pharma industry average to incentivize setting up of a lot of R&D companies. More competing R&D companies will mean more innovation and lower licensing fees too.

Finally, the Time correspondent in Delhi will basically have heard the pro-pharma argument from a PR company and leant towards it. You will be surprised how many journalists can be fed material so easily.

There are several colours that do not reproduce well in CMYK. Some expensive, usually large format, printers use additional custom inks to improve the quality of output. But these are not '8 colour' printers as they are claimed to be. They just have 8 inks being applied to the print medium to reproduce the artwork instead of the regular 4.

When I was a kid, we could get plenty of hydrogen filled balloons. We would tie up a few of them together and then suspend a bit of burning plastic bag from the balloons at night and release them. In the darkness of the night, the sight of something burning while rising up in the air looked quite eerie. And when the heat from the burning plastic bag was enough to rupture the balloon, BOOM!

The show was spectacular. But now that I think about it, we were lucky to not have had one of those balloons blow up in our faces.