Not correct. The Tamil Tigers and various other groups have used women suicide bombers. Rajiv Gandhi, the ex-Prime Minister of India was killed by female suicide bomber.

The Indian Christian Church (at least some of them) have a history of doing stuff like this; the aggressive conversion tactics they have adopted will put most US fundamentalist churches to shame. During a trip out there a few years ago, I witnessed a priest perform a "your Hindu god is false" demonstration in public field, accompanied by (I kid you not) an orchestra, with the entire performance amplified by huge speakers placed all around. The priest was dressed in robes reminiscent of a medieval Pope, and threw a Hindu Idol and a Cross into a big glass tank of water. The Hindu Idol sank, and the cross floated, and the guy exclaimed that this showed that the Hindu god was a false god. It was obvious that the idol was made of stone and the cross of wood. There was a huge crowd standing by, many of them ooh'd and aah'd. It looked like at least some of the ooh'ers were part of the performance. I went up to the priest and challenged him, and he started yelling at me. Some of his acolytes grabbed me and basically pushed me away from the place. I think I would surely have been beaten up if I had not been a foreigner.

I learned later that this sort of stuff is quite common in India. The church has started Christian ceremonies during mainstream Indian festivals like Diwali etc, during which time theys hold huge, extravagant masses to celebrate supposedly Christian events. If you are a student of history and want to know how "Christmas" ultimately ended up in December, this would be an object lesson.

The thing that amazed me was how tolerant the crowds were. Here was a guy who was yelling insults about the mainstream religion in a public place, and a vast crown just watched and let him have his say in peace. I doubt if this would happen in the US, let alone in any predominantly Islamic place.

Banning porn/hookers is basically pandering to women. Much of Woman's social influence and power derives from the sexual hold She has on Man. Pornography and hookers directly threaten that hold.

This is not very different from the govt trying to get the ACTA through to satisfy the movie industry.

Homeschooled tea-party supporter, huh?

This is just pure whitewashing and has been debunked multiple times.

As someone with a fair amount of experience in high tech and software development, I'd argue that everything you wrote about Indian programmers could equally apply to American ones. Still, for the sake of argument, let us assume that you are right. There is still one overwhelming reasons why managers (i.e. PHBs) prefer Indian programmers (either in the USA or India). That is: ego (or the lack of it).

Let us face it: Indians in general are happy to do what they are told. They do not grumble that the work is not challenging enough, or too demeaning. They tend to stick with the company even they are not doing the most sexy, glamorous work. They don't mind following software development processes laid down by management (and in fact, from what I've seen, many of them actually find that preferable to `genius' type mind-to-keyboard) programming. They do not mind working on bugfixes. They do not mind working under the direction of other, senior people, especially if the senior people are Americans.

Compare that to the average American engineer you find, especially in Silicon Valley. Let us postulate for the sake of argument that they are all programming gods. But I'd also argue that you won't find a more ego-centric, arrogant, inconsiderate bunch of prima donnas outside an Italian opera house. They are great at early stage startups as they sling together large amounts of code quickly. But they are absolutely terrible at dealing with the `grindwork' required to transform the technology into a product. They complain. They whine. They blackmail the management ("Institute that process and I'm gone!!"). They quit at inconvenient times anyway.

I'd argue that unless you are doing something at the super-high end, you probably don't need everyone at that talent level. For the average tech company, a mix of 20% Americans and 80% Indians would probably be more than adequate. The PHBs know this. That is why outsourcing will continue unless the govt puts a stop to it by some means.

Absolutely. If this is true, this may well be a deliberate act of provocation, intended to get Iran's military to do something stupid or over-reach, which would give the US the excuse it needs to start the war which the war machine desperately wants.

This sort of thing happens all the time; Country A wants to invade Country B, but needs a `good/just/patriotic' reason to sell home and abroad. Enter the agent provocateur.

America is the largest arms exporter in the world; the only reason the dictators don't provide American arms to their rank and file is because they are in general too expensive and perceived to be unreliable compared to AKs. But there are plenty of American-made heavy weapons found all over third-world killing zones.

Usually, when some right-wing guy brings up the `get a pair' taunt during some argument about some symbol/statement/law that offends somebody, I usually use the following to make them get the point.

1) Mosque at ground zero. If the Muslims have money to set up a mosque there, why is it your concern? You should just swallow your feelings, right?
2) Mapplethorpe Exhibit. Jesus in a jar of urine. You should just man up, right?
3) Gay parade in SF. Everybody should just STFU, right?

You get the picture. There are lots of such examples you can bring up.

Gnome 3.0 does not even start up on most systems with nVidia-based graphics cards. I've been trying to get it started to no avail. Nobody seems to know or care about the problem. I've had to switch to xfce.

Makes no sense to me; KDE4.x works fine, so does Gnome 2.x. X itself has no problem either for 2D, 3D or sound. Hope they have fixed this in 3.2.

This is an unfortunate consequence of Wall Street getting to call too many shots.

Wall Street does not want hands-on, promoted from within CEOs in any company, especially not publicly traded ones. It wants CEOs whose worldview is the same as theirs. The ideal CEO would buy into their worldview, and who would react to impulses that make sense to Wall Street and ignore all other information. Wall Street is particularly biased against folks with engineering training.

In general, stocks of any company where the CEO does not have connections to/is not beholden to Wall Street get punished and under-perform. This puts pressure on the board to hire `media darling' sociopathic CEOs.

In addition, such a CEO would make damned sure that there is no obvious internal candidate replacement as a survival strategy, by emasculating anyone who seems competent, or making sure they have no public profile whatsoever. There are plenty of academic studies that establish this.

There are still a few companies that have a strong tradition of training mgmt or promoting from within. GE is an obvious example.

Didn't both Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman run as tea-party candidates last year?

A good friend of mine recently interviewed at Google for a technical position and was turned down; a first in his career and a nasty shock for the man. This is a guy who has done fundamental work in his field, which is admittedly not web-programming but an underlying discipline that Google is now trying to get into. He said that he was interviewed by a bunch of fairly young programmers, a couple of whom admitted that they had not even read his resume. One of them said `My job is to ask you about search', and hit him with a bunch of questions about graph theory algorithms, even though he admitted that he had not done anything in that field and it was not really required for the specific group he was interviewing for. His opinion of the process was that it is biased VERY heavily towards people who are just out of school, since they are the only folks who will have such knowledge at their fingerprints. If that particular hiring process is representative, Google is hiring themselves a bunch of people that fit a specific paradigm, and blatantly screening out folks that don't fit. Time will tell if this serves them well in the long term.

They are probably cross-referencing the info provided by the user against their databases. I'm sure the personal data available to facebook is comprehensive. For example:

New user lists his/her address, gender. John Smith, Male, 13, lives at 20 Silicon Valley way, CA.

Facebook accesses data bases that tell it that the inhabitants of 20 Silicon Valley way are Peter, Mary, Linda & John, ages 35, 32, 13 & 10, respectively.

Facebook figures out that the new user is actually only 10.

Well, assuming that he has no knowledge about how the thing works and has no other information, his computation of probabilities is technically correct :)