India has enough population to fill most jobs :) But yes there is immigration for work in India too, from its neighbours - Nepalis for e.g. are commonly employed as guards in societies, they have a much better reputation for not sleeping on the job haha. IIRC there is significant illegal immigration from Bangladesh too, but not sure in which sectors.

> You can't train intelligence though. I'm sure India has an equivalent IQ to European populations but they have many "engineers" that really aren't suited to that field as well.

I'll disagree here to some extent. If someone grows up studying in an education system that encourages memorization and rote learning over critical thinking (a major failing imho in Indian education syllabus) then it will certainly have a stunting effect on his intelligence and reasoning capacity. A majority of those 'engineers' are basically human machines that would be good for repetitive tasks, but not as useful for comprehending complex systems and enhancing them.

There are of course many Indian engineers who are actually good, but most of them end up outside of the country to find better work. And then they get drowned out statistically by the hordes who don't really care or take initiatives to develop their skills, but are in it for the money and have suffered thru rote learning way too much as said above.

Well, its a general failing of most democratic countries that the less educated and lower earning groups reproduce more, get a larger voting share and then end up using a lot of social benefits. No politicians are going to discuss such issues and risk upsetting their vote banks, unless somehow they're lucky enough to have highly qualified demographics in their constituency.

Female infanticide is illegal in India btw, though it seems to go on in remote villages etc. Every now & then there are stories about gender based abortions in some village. Its not as common in metros, but I guess there should still be incidents but rarely reported - maybe city people are more circumspect about flouting laws and hence its harder for media to find out.

Even in a large metropolis like Mumbai, many colleges (think grad schools for B.S. equivalent) have a hard time attracting good or even decent teaching staff for technical positions. I'm not up to date with their current state, but they even had people just hired to fill in positions so there was a teacher present for the subject - people who would just 'explain' stuff from textbooks, and do a worse job than students just reading from it! Naturally this also means that most practical assignments (coding, EE circuits or w/e) aren't properly assessed, and many of them are exact copies of those given to previous class years. Which led to rampant copying of the previous year's journals with the majority not bothering to even try and understand the material :(

I actually think that teaching situation should change for the better with a slump in the job market. Previously, many qualified teachers left academia due to rise of IT as the pittance of a salary they were getting wasn't enough to retain them. By now, salaries in the better institutions have improved quite a bit (I hope actually, not sure lol) and there will be several decent candidates unable to get a job who may consider teaching as a career.

> amid growing fears that electronic devices can pose as homemade bombs.

Shouldn't TSA care more about homemade bombs that masquerade as electronics. If an electronic gadget wants to play make-believe, shouldn't that be covered by AI rights in future ... TSA trying to get in laws ahead of time?

Politicians love their vote banks, and will never promote good technologies or any progress that can lead to job loss in the short term. Nobody really tries to think beyond the timeframe that they will be up for re-election, so having a benefit in the medium / long term is simply irrelevant.

Unlike China which aims to be an AI superpower in next couple of decades, India will happily plod along trying to maximize unskilled jobs to make for nice employment statistics. Its very frustrating to see how much inefficiency exists in all areas that could be easily solved by automation or just better processes. Gas station attendants just to pump gas, crappy websites for most services so you end up having to visit physical offices, broken transportation system which guarantees lots of chauffeur employment as no one actually wants to drive if possible, .... and sadly, all parties are populists to some degree or other so there is no chance of things changing for the better due to policy. Most of the economic progress in India happens despite the administration rather than because of it :(

Over the past few years, traffic in India has actually become worse instead of improving, exacerbated by all the construction without corresponding commute improvements in cities like Mumbai.

However a robot is probably better suited to always looking in all 4 directions and tailgating 1m behind the vehicle in front continuously to avoid someone squeezing in line - so maybe AI drivers would be far more useful on Indian roads, where driving is otherwise an exhausting ordeal :( Programming it would be quite a task, and you probably want to have 360 deg camera coverage to guard against spurious accident claims, but on the plus side - it probably won't have to deal with speeds above 50 km/h within the city, as most roads are perpetually congested.

Well, for now its just a show - will be interesting if they actually attempt this when they're in power, since the 2 parties do keep on alternating at the reins quite often.

Hopefully Comcast gets split into 3 or more parts that compete in the same markets, and don't insist on TV connections to get deals that are better than standalone internet plans.

> Slashdot has never been good

It used to have higher quality discussions a LONG time back - before Digg became popular and /. at the time started going downhill, losing even more good members.

That's what I used to assume, that lack of DirectX support and having to port to OpenGL etc. made it much harder for games developers to support Linux etc. But nowadays so many games support OS X which is also not using DX (and is a *nix variant), but same games still have no support for *nix - so obviously there are other reasons that just porting difficulties :(

I was surprised to read this as I had no idea what is the relation between upgrading to Ryzen and having Windows 7,prompting me to do some research on it. Now I have to rethink about my thoughts to upgrade desktop to Ryzen soon :-( , thanks for the heads-up.

It turns out that AMD doesn't support Win 7 on Ryzen processors, which can cause a lot of problems with installation. There is a detailed guide on getting them working together that I skimmed thru - http://www.anandtech.com/show/11182/how-to-get-ryzen-working-on-windows-7-x64 . Although it seems doable and I have also played around with nLite to make custom OS install images in the past (with newer drivers & integrating patches etc.), it definitely doesn't seem like a good idea to jump through so many hoops just for an OS installation.

Most probably I'll just switch to Linux finally, though I will miss the ability to install any random old PC game when I feel like it. Luckily most of my gaming is limited to few titles like LoL and ESO which afaik do work well on Linux/Wine.

Having to tweak settings to get things 'just right' is vastly different from having to tweak a lot to get back to a usable state - which you would get from start with an earlier version of the same product. Not to mention, you can only do all this customization on your own system and not when you're doing tech support for friends/family :(

So you think LG needs a competitor to the Note 7 to grab the public spotlight?