As someone who went through the legal process in the UK I can tell you that I have a good "profile" (senior developer, high earning power, middle class background etc) and I barely made it in because I didn't have an academic degree. In fact the points system keeps changing and today I wouldn't be accepted.

I don't have a problem with it, countries aren't obligated to let anyone in. But when you talk about legal immigration you should understand that the systems are built to only allow the cream of the crop in. Scientists, Engineers, Doctors, Entrepreneurs - high earning power, money, education. In many countries that means higher social economic background to begin with.

95% of the people wouldn't be able to get in through the legal process. At the same time the US, Western Europe and friends and basically sucking in the best minds of the third world and developing countries.

I'm not justifying or criticising either side, just trying to shed some light on why many people might choose the illegal route.

In other words:
1. Over the past decade growth in the biotech and pharmaceutical sectors has been observed in India, Brazil, Singapore and other countries with emerging economies.
2. Over the past decade increases in patents in the biotech and pharmaceutical sectors in India, Brazil, Singapore and other countries with emerging economies.

I would guess these new companies that grew over the past decade in the biotech and pharmaceutical sectors in India, Brazil, Singapore and other countries with emerging economies *for various reasons*, have also secured their achievements with patents as in this days not doing so is suicidal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation

Yeah but that company has the i-factor, this mysterious elixir that makes people get addicted to your meaningless electronic toy products as if they were crack.

Without that companies have to compete in an actual free market, where trying to be economically efficient and lowering your price is the key to survival.

Shroedinger's cat could be dead or alive. Each time I log in to Google+ on the other hand - it's dead.

Troll? Gentlemen this should be modded 5: "Genius Irony" !

I don't understand, it's enough to just graze a microscopic layer off the tip of the firing pin to render the gun "unidentifiable" ?

Yet Another Google Language.

2000 years ago at the height of the Roman Empire there was *a lot* of travelling. Not all of it by will...

Considering that we have no proof that Jacob is a real person who actually existed, let alone having any surviving genetic sample from him, I think any attempt to assert that a person living today descended from Jacob or not is nonsense.

As an Earthling I feel like throwing in the towel and getting the hell out of this dump of a rock a while now.

You are comparing two different things in this context. jQuery isn't meant to insulate you from what you describe as "browser craziness". jQuery is meant to give you browser abstraction, while still speaking browser.

GWT on the other hand gives you the ability to develop with a desktop-like API and behaviour inside the browser, which comes at a price. GWT is much slower to develop in then simple HTML/CSS/JS and this insulation also means you are too detached from the underlying HTML/CSS which isn't necessarily good when you do want to think in terms of HTML/CSS for validation / accessibility / SEO purposes.

For people familiar with HTML/CSS/JS doing simple stuff with a couple of jQuery lines is preferable to GWT. In really depends on the context.

I work as a Java developer and we're building websites on an SOA architecture with restful backends. In this regard we see the web app as "just another client".

We use spring MVC for the browser-facing server app, and Jersey for the backend (I use the terms loosely here because this backend is still public-facing since it serves the mobile apps as well, so it is in itself a standalone secure web app).

We use velocity or freemarker for the web app pages.

I would warm-heartedly recommend this setup, it's hard to go wrong with it. That said, it's only one valid approach.

GWT is good if you want to create a RIA, when the presentation logic is so complex developing it in javascript is a nightmare, but without having to use Flash or silverlight. If the presentation is simple enough however, I would stick to HTML5 + jQuery. In fact the "simple enough" bar in that last statement is gradually pushed forward.

As a rule of thumb I'd say if you have a lot of moving parts on the page and you are basically creating a desktop application inside the browser ala Google docs, then consider GWT. Otherwise it will do more harm than good.

If the US wants to block a given .ru it can do so, it's just a question of forcing ISPs to block it. I don't know what the current legislation in the US is for ISPs and what they are obliged or not to do when the government asks them to. But at the end of the day the traffic has to pass through some medium to reach Russia, and neither you or me or our ISPs laid down network cables across the Atlantic or put communication satellites in orbit.

What's the obsession with .com? Well there is already a lot invested in .com and the US holds all of this power. You can't just tell everyone to "switch to .ru what's the big deal?". That was a good question to ask 10 years ago. Right now it's fact and the question is how to distribute the power of .com.

What I'm suggesting will create anarchy in TLDs, that is true. But in practice nothing really has to change. The registry for .uk becomes authoritive for .com in the UK, the registry for .fr becomes authoritive for .com in France, and so on. Then they just need to agree on a process for change management between them, and a way to resolve disputes. When disputes cannot be resolved there will be fragmentation, which I believe is better then one side, the one that happens to control the TLDs, forces their laws and opinions on the other.

In practice 99.9% there won't be any issues, and the rest of the time it will be around politics or intellectual property. But it is exactly this potential of fragmentation and anarchy that will guarantee the global neutrality of the "global" TLDs.

I think your understanding kinda sucks. The US didn't "build" the internet. US-based researchers developed the initial concepts and protocols that are the foundation of the internet. "The US" didn't build the communication infrastructure in Europe, Canada or the Middle East. "The US" didn't raise ISPs around the world and didn't connect households in Norway to communication hubs.

"The US" can't tell an ISP in Germany or Brazil what IP address to map a given domain name to. If those ISPs decided to map it to something else, there is fuck all "The US" can do about it.