“It is clear that Solyndra was a dubious investment,” representatives Fred Upton, of Michigan, and Cliff Stearns, of Florida, said in a joint statement. The company “is just the latest casualty of the Obama administration’s failed stimulus.”

Meanwhile China continues to invest is loss incurring businesses and technologies to under-cut and eradicate the competition.

I have worked long and hard in my profession to get devs to fix security bugs. The reaction mostly falls in one of these categories:
1. I do not understand the issue (read, I am just copying code of the interwebs and have no clue about my job).
2. I understand the issue but we are under the gun to release the product.
3. I understand the issue but the vulnerability is theoretical (read, I don't understand anything about large scale production infrastructure)

Bottom-line: Unless a security big breaks functionality, a dev doesn't care.

Sorry to devs who care but after a decade of trying devs to release secure code, my opinion maybe a bit biased.

Every time one of these ex-XYZ or ex-Army or current ones open their mouth, it becomes abundantly clear how clueless they are about nature of the digital worlds and how hopeless it is to entrust the DoD/Government's digital security in their hands.

This article and many other western publication paint the picture that BPOs are the only game in town for young Indians. Not true. Engineers are in very high demand, especially Civil, Mining and Mechanical engineers. College graduates with degrees in commerce or liberal arts also do well depending on the first job they take up. Jobs that service the local market are tougher but have an actual career path. But you won't get to work in a nice air-conditioned office, won't have a car to pick and drop you back and initial pay will be lower than a call center job. Several of my friends who started working for local banks and selling financial products to Indians started off with low pays and jobs that require a lot of enterprise and leg-work. Ten years later, most of them make more money that I do in silicon valley with a respectable 6 figure salary. People (kids really), who end up in BPO jobs get attracted by the initial high salary, party like culture on premises (free food, chicks, parties thrown to retain employees). So can't really blame capitalism for this mess. These young people can chose - start with a good pay and good work environment but boring job and no career path OR start low, work hard but have a viable career ten years down the line.

RTFA and comments on it. Apparently, the linked article is a pro-Palantir marketing gimmick.

IT departments do not care about stupid and retarded. They say NO because they cannot deliver with the resource constraints they have. Example, company wants to launch a new mobile app to complement an existing service. Mobile app takes couple of months to conceive and write. To demo the app, salespeople need to be armed with Android/iOS devices. That means IT must support Android/iOS devices. IT's response - Hell NO! We can only support BlackBerry. It will take a 6 month project to support other devices. Result, you are late to the market by at least 3 months with your app and meanwhile other business steals your slice of business.

Business hasn't gotten immature and impatient, the market has grown too dynamic for a business to make a 5-year plan and consequently, tell IT their exact needs for the next 5 years. Market conditions change so frequently and rapidly that businesses need technology solutions that can evolve with the market. If IT cannot keep up then it is doomed to disappear.

Businesses aren't afraid of technology, they just want to use it and not get bogged down in details of how IT works. No business person should need to know how IT works. Just like you don't have to worry about how electricity gets delivered to you. You just use it.
Today it's called the cloud, tomorrow they will find a new marketing name but the underlying theme is that in-house shops are on the death spiral. Long back, I read Sun's analogy of the situation with the airplane business. In-house shops are like every organization trying to build their own plane, own airports and own everything. "Cloud" or whatever you want to call it is a shared service. Users do not have to worry about how to build a build, how to fly or who is flying my plane. They just buy a ticket and fly. Similarly, business users do not want/have to know how technology works or pay to build a solution from scratch. They should be able to pay and use what they need. That has been the guiding principle of technology evolution from the days of mainframe.

For most business users, poor service is better than no service. I have seen hundreds of projects and millions of dollars wasted across multiple companies because IT simply cannot deliver. The "cloud", in comparison, may suck or be unreliable but if it provides the basic functionality that a business needs then it wins over local IT. Simple.

hey Tennessee, Saudi Arabia called. They want their right to suppress free speech back.

Now, i am scared!

Read Google's blog post here:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/ensuring-your-information-is-safe.html

Nowhere do they point fingers at the Chinese government. They merely pointed out source of the attack was based in a certain Chinese city. It is the Chinese who interpreted that as pointing at the Chinese govt. Why would the Chinese do that unless they are aware of the attack being carried out by their army/govt. They could've just said they will investigate further the origin and trace the attackers. No, instead they went into this defensive spin. Shows the Chinese govt is guilty (al though Google didn't accuse them).

#Lame #Fail.

Information = Signal - noise. Why try to destroy the signal when it is easier to add noise to the point that information obtained is useless. In plain speak, add lots of random information associated with your name on different social networking and other sites. Result is that anyone looking for you will get such diverse and nonsensical information that they will abandon the pursuit and profile.

Look around. There are countries like Singapore, Dubai, Brunei where the state is all powerful and people are happy because crime is low, livelihood is plenty and life is easy. No one gives two hoots there about democracy or privacy. Economic freedom matters a gazillion times more to most people that political.