Also, I am amazed that this was not invented till now. Me and my friends were discussing the same thing - IIRC - about 3 years ago?

This will be a boon for laptops though. I felt that trackpad is not as useful as mouse - this can alleviate that issue

I agree with all your points. I would also like to add the effect of confidence.
For me, if I am confident that I am in it for the long term, my effort goes up quite a bit.

The effort is not fully visible to my boss all the time - since most of the effort goes in non-obvious, but nevertheless extremely important aspects of programming - thinking deeply about design and deciding the exact architecture which can handle most of the future enhancements, creating the best aspects for UI design and exact representations of qualitative and quantitative information, creating good test cases, creating bug proof code etc.

But, even if the effort is not visible to my boss straightaway, I dont have to care, since I am confident that my boss has confidence in me and that I am not going to be a fungible commodity to him.

If, as per mentioned in the article, that sort of competition and lack of confidence in workers is rife in the company, I am not going to create always the best output - rather I will be going to produce the safest output - the one with the most visibility - never mind how it performs later, after I get the advantages out of it. This is going to cause negative effects in the company in the long term.

I was in a big (1 lakh + employees) company earlier. There I was considered an easily replaceable resource - even though my performance was quite good, with this amount of people, they could always get a better person than me to replace me. Even though I did not know it at that time, my performance was then less than optimum - i.e. I was not trying to improve myself a great deal - due to lack of confidence and this was a negative cycle.

After quite a few years with this company, I was burned out, and I left to start my own company. Then I was absorbed (along with my product) by another startup. In the last 2 years, I think I have learned as much as the 10 years before in the big company - and my quality of work has now improved a great deal - this especially being because in the startup - and my own company - I gained a lot of confidence that I am in it for a long time.

Actually, the aspects of confidence is extremely visible in sports etc, wherein if the player knows he is in it for a long time, he tries to play his natural game - and he is not hamstrung by the fact that a risky move will not jeopardize his career.

Why the management in most companies do not understand this - I have no idea.

I also prefer desktops, but where I am from, (India), we do have power cuts quite often. Since there is no battery, it means that a UPS is a necessity. Also, here, most desktops do not sell with wireless adaptor - which means I have to buy the wireless adaptor separately.
Now, considering all those, the price difference does not match up - and most UPS can carry 20 minutes worth of power, so compared to my laptop (4-5 hours battery on average), it does not even come close.

I would guess that in India, one of the major reasons people shy away from desktops is because of these factors - many friends who moved from desktop to laptop - is because of this. Most have a desktop setup though - with multiple monitors and keyboard, and they dock their laptop to it.

While this is funny - this is indeed what is going to happen in some time with the reader interface.
The web site owners have reason to be peeved - if the user uses reader extensively, for web sites that are ad-based, they have no revenue stream. Why should they then spending their money, time and effort to create the web site contents?

So, either - as OP pointed out, they will intentionally sabotage reader mode or stop serving web pages to safari altogether. I would actually prefer the second option since I think this was a rather unethical thing to do from Apples part.

I am all for technology that enables users - google has shown the world how to provide the users with all support and then make money - for example they provided IMAP support in email, but then created such a beautiful mail interface that people I know use both thunderbird and web client. Thus, Google provide all support, and in turn they ask us to support them by at least viewing their unobstrusive ads.

I consider that a fair give and take. But what apple now has done is unfair - in my opinion. YMMV.

There has been quite a bit of scientific literature regarding BPA - see the links from Wikipedia.

Also, the fact that top kill failed while their oil siphoning mechanism was perfected seems rather dubious.
I understand that BP was taking a lot of flak, and they might be wary of pulling such a trick, but still my cynical side is not disallowing that possibility.

Generalizations are generally incorrect.
In India - we do have anti-intellectual sentiment in colleges, people think that talent and ability is innate, getting good marks while being lazy is better than getting excellent grades after hardwork and so on and so forth.
The difference I can see is that most asians who attempt spelling bee are kids whose parents who have immigrated to foreign countries.
These people usually are much more hard working and also have a high pro-intellectual sentiment - which then shows up in their kids too.

Actually the leading theory suggests that they did have the knowledge of fire, but then lost it. Many other island cultures do show this behaviour - due to isolation.

One major reason why the blame is on man is that these species did not co-evolve with man.
By the time humans reached say Australia, they were already very intelligent and were the apex predator of all the habitats he encountered, due to organisation, fire and tools.
Since they did not co-evolve, these birds which were not afraid of humans since they have not seen humans before. Thus, they became easy prey to humans before they could evolve to learn fear for humans.
Actually, humans are blamed for mega fauna extinction in almost all the continents other than africa due to the exact same thing. And this was a detriment to their future evolution due to lack of mega fauna to domesticate too - which is a different subject altogether.

Thank you very much.
I was actually looking for such information.
Thank you again.

I was under the impression that if we go back to school, we can work and study at the same time.

Am I wrong here?

I am actually planning to go back to school sometime - but I have no savings - so I do not want to lose the job too. It would be sad if such an option does not exist.

Sorry, if my previous mail looked too nationalistic. I am a person who wants to be a global citizen in my views; even though I dont succeed all the time.

I completely agree that it sucks to live in most places - esp if you are quite poor. What I was just trying to say in my original post was that there are many other things which people do not consider when they ponder about happiness. I myself was not aware of it until I read Jared. So, I was just trying to put it forward.

Again, sorry if my mail looked like I was being too nationalistic. I myself wants to come to US for Ph.D in say 4-5 years, because I consider the educational institutions in US much better than that of India. So, as you can see, my intent was not to disparage US or not to put India in a pedestal. Just that different countries have different positives and negatives.

I accept I was in the wrong to classify Western Cultures as not being family oriented. It was as bad, or even worse - as the OP telling all Indians would wet themselves in the prospect of going to US.
What I wanted to actually say was that -as per Jared - developing economies and even hunter-gatherer cultures seems to be as happy or even happier than people in developed economies due to other things which usually does not come in to picture.
When I tried to explain it, it came out wrong. My bad.

I take that you do not know too much about India. I think it is short sighted to talk about a country you have not lived in for atleast few years. Whatever you think as true, might not be, you know.

I am an Indian, and I have lots of friends who went to USA, came back and do not want to go back there. Lest you think it is just anecdotal evidence, Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs and Steel has quite a bit of literature specifically set for this scenario. His finding was that, even though living in developed countries provide you better healthcare and even better security, the overall quality of living actually is same or even lesser in developed economies compared to developing economies*.

The overall quality of life is determined by lots of factors - one of the most important being relations. Humans seems to be most happy with very close and extended families and lot of friends, which is usually lost in western cultures. Most of my friends are back here because they want to be home.

Regarding creative output, I would have to say that you are quite wrong in that aspect. Also it is not correct to calculate creativity based on how many hollywood movies that country has come up with.

We have our own genres of music, two of the most popular being Carnatic and hindustani, we have our own genres of dances, the most important eight being Kathakali, Bharatanatyam, Kuchipudi, Odissi, Manipuri, Sattriya and Kathak.

Please note that these are only the major ones known throughout India. Each state has completely different set of dances and music associated with it which people follow widely. In addition to these we have good literature movement, very good drama movement and each state has their own movie system too. India has more than 20 major languages, so the movies are usually made for one language only - i.e. why it is not appreciated much outside the country.

What I would suggest is do not go just by what best sellers and media portray - the actuality might be very different. Also, please consider that what you consider as happiness might not be the only scale with which others measure theirs.

* Unless they are in poverty.