Given the multiple sources of information that we often have to deal with, there's a lot of good work to be done in terms of data-visualisation for threat-perception matrices, Surface being one of the many things you can implement. There's obviously some branding going on now, but hey, the way I see it, _any_ tech-branding is good in these uncertain times.

Most places with progressive emigration regimes offer something called as 'permanent residency' as default, instead of the relatively half-baked guest-worker status. The benefits are obvious to everyone; PR's pay taxes, contribute to social security, have no political rights and get less preference in such services as schools, house-allotments (yes, housing is socialized in some countries) and medical services (they pay more). In return, their visas are tied to their passports, and not to the companies they work for. Fair, simple and efficient.

US has a similar window for emigration; it's informally called as 'green card'. Just this:- the wait period to get that status is super-long; way way waaaaaaaay longer than for other countries. (It's about three months in places like Singapore, 3-ish years in Canada, while it is 6-8 years in the US) Which is why you have such half-baked idiocy as balloting for 80,000-a-year tied-to-company guest-worker visas; the US government, essentially, outsources the validation of each candidate to individual companies(validating that the candidate is contributing to the economy).

Essentially, like other departments offering governmental services, the US' immigration services are facing a problem of scaling up their operations. What makes this scaling up unique, though, is that citizens don't see this as being ultimately services to themselves, but as governmental services to an unstated Other. There is, therefore, no motivated self-interest to improve things quickly anywhere. The politicians think this is working, because the system has self-imposed caps, but clearly, it isn't the _number_ that's the main problem, it's quality.

The United States is the best country in the World to do business in.

One of the largest economies to sell in, I'll grant you that. It isn't considered the absolute best though, that apparently would be Hong Kong. Indeed, all four economies Hong Kong and Singapore have a considerably freer visa-regimes; in Singapore, in particular, has a million guest-workers against a total resident population of about five million.

A more relevant bit to this discussion, though, is not about hiring, but firing. I look forward to hearing your views on how it'll help meritocracy in America if you fire employees not based on performance or need for an enterprise, but based on something as arbitary as the colours of their passports.

Moonlight can never be a substitute for Silverlight. They just back-ported the stream from SL 2.0 to SL 1.0 to get it running this time around.

You're right about the Linux hack though; the fact that they pulled this off this fast is quite a feat myself. Extreme, clanky balls made out of brass as well; if I was leading the effort at such a high-profile website, I'd have enforced a code-freeze at least a week earlier. (May be that's why I'm not in that position. Hmmmm.)

Built-in optimization for multimedia. Streams better. Go to the Singtel Grid Girls site; you'll see 60 videos being loaded in one go (5 * 4 grid with three states for each girl). Not a Flash guy myself, but I'm told streaming it all is a bitch in Flash. Not so in Silverlight.

As a MS developer with a journalist girlfriend who runs Linux on her Asus EEE PC, I fart in their general direction. ;-)

</gloats>

I would understand 'modern age' to include possession of the will and the technology necessary to prevent the British from occupying to begin with

I'm not sure why you'd confuse military conquest with an epoch, or even why the British conquest of the sub-continent was profound in a historical sense; India has been conquered before by earlier marauding invaders, British were merely the last. None of the earlier invasions were epoch-making, so I'm not entirely certain why you'd consider British wins in the battles of Plassey, for example, to be qualitatively different from, say, the Battle of Tarain, or even the First Battle of Panipat. Perhaps your euro-centricism is at display here?

As for will, you seem to be under the impression that the British state completely subjugated India as a whole. This certainly wasn't the case; the British East India Company, (and not the British Empire, as you will see) was one of the many players in the Great Game. In addition to a certain monopoly over opium, tea and other exotic stuff, they also offered military solutions, not dissimilar to Blackwater in contemporary times; legions of Indian kingdoms outsourced their military from the British East India Company. Indeed, they continued doing even after the Company was "nationalized" in the wake of the events of 1857; they merely changed their outsourcee from a public-limited company to a governmental wing. This continued till 1947; one of the first resolutions (and some would say the continued crisis in Kashmir) of the United Nations were because of these agreements: now that the British were finally leaving, questions were raised on the validity of these military agreements, going back three hundred years

In short, even using your non-standard definition of "Modern Age" (which, must say, is quite unique), I still don't see how the British brought about the "Modern Age" that you so define.

Was it not poverty, religious beliefs (idol worship), and lack of technology preventing such

Here's a thought, and this might come as a surprise, but you have no idea. None at all. May I suggest reading up a bit first, say, the White Mughals and the The Last Mughal? Among other things, you'll be interested to know that a) the British came and tried to monopolize trade in India because of the region's wealth, that the battles fought by the British were against Muslim republics; the first Battle of Independence in 1857, for example, was widely seen as a jihad even though most of the foot soldiers were Hindu. I'm not sure where idol worship comes into play in this discussion at all, or even why it was a problem militarily speaking.

You have a point on military technology; I mean, it's clear that the armies of the British East India Company were better trained, better equipped and more efficient than the native armies. However, and here's where the _Company_ bit comes in, native rulers typically used a mixture of diplomacy, trade, intrigue _and_ military options in their foreign policy; while they were used to negotiating trade or forming military alliances with kingdoms, they clearly didn't know how to do it with an anonymous public limited _company_. You can't, among other things, defuse its threat by giving your daughter in a matrimonial alliance, for example. There is no hear, no _emotion_ involved in working with a 200 year-old trading company, and the native rulers, for all their might, power, wealth and diplomacy, simply couldn't tame the beast.

Oh don't bother. If seven years of Slashdot has taught me anything, it is that Americans here on /. are so steadfast in their opinion that no amount of logic will ever make them consider anything else.

And that's not related to that god-awful Red-Blue demarcation that Americans love to spout on; push comes to shove, everyone, San Franciscans, New Yorkers, Pittsburghers, Buttesvillans are alll convinced about their moral and logical superiority, completely oblivious to the sheer reality that most of the rest of the world has far superior telecom and transport infrastructure.

Now watch as this post gets downmodded to oblivion.

About India--I think they have a very valid point.

If by "Modern Age", you mean an epoch in human history, than India was already in the Modern Age by the 1500's; hell, the entire world was in the Modern Age just about the same time, seeing as it is that the calendar across the world is the same and is wholly unaffected by traders travelling across the world.

If you meant the figurative meaning of "Modern Age", which Wikipedia loosely calls as "progress driven by deliberate human efforts to better their situation", then a case can easily be made that India went the _opposite_ direction, what with the GDP falling and life-expectancy, infant mortality etc falling even more during the British Era.

On the other hand, if you meant it to be a "replace[ment] [of] the Biblical-oriented value system, revalued the monarchical government system, and abolished the feudal economic system, with new democratic and liberal ideas in the areas of politics, science, psychology, sociology, and economics" (from the earlier Wiki link), then you could say that that did not begin happening until the late 1930's, when India had its first limited self-government and began taking steps against the feudal zamindari system. In either case, I'm not entirely certain if you'd like to call the British Raj as being liberal; they had an efficient administrative system, but liberal they weren't.

Finally, if you really meant that India "opened" itself up to the rest of the world because of the British, even that can't really stand up to scrutiny, considering that we had been trading with West Asia and China for five thousand years before the Portuguese and the British blockaded our ports. Even technology isn't really a point to be made for the British; we had rockets and cannons from the French.

The British's main claim to fame is ensuring that the ports they set up, the Bombays, Singapores and Hong Kongs of the world were laissez-faire entrepots to their respective hinterlands, but you can hardly credit modernism for that; when you run the largest and most powerful trading firm the world has ever seen, you want to make sure them factories run properly.

I live in Singapore and it's an indoor sport for people with better motor skills than I do. :-) Hasn't stopped raining outside though...

Oh please. One brave officer doesn't make the entire force brave or effective. There are plenty of firsthand reports about Mumbai police hiding and refusing to return fire. Of course, some people even claim that these police didn't even have any ammunition in their bolt-action rifles, so if that's true, I certainly can't blame them, as that would be suicidal.

A friend of a friend survived the ordeal at the Taj and two of his friends died there. A neighbour was killed at the Oberoi hotel. I know people in south Mumbai who saw action up-close, and all of them are unanimous in talking about the bravery shown by the Mumbai police; people forget that there were engaged in 13 different locations across Mumbai, before the three situations in Nariman House, Oberoi and the Taj emerged.

We most definitely agree that the police needed more firepower, as with bullet-proof vests and the rapid-response team's reaction-time; there were some significant, and wholly unacceptable delays in responding to the situation that could have saved many more lives. But that the Mumbai police did _not_ engage the terrorists isn't something that I've been told by people I know, and I see no reason to think otherwise based on what you said.

Carrying guns is helpful because armed citizens are a strong deterrent to invasion.

I think you misunderstand the nature of the challenge here; the challenge is _not_ an armed invasion, it is a _sustained_ period of possible violence by unnamed killers. _Across_ Asia, and they're doing this in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Bali as well in addition to India, they have metal-detectors and constant frisking in public places. When everyone is on the lookout for the odd bomb going off somewhere, I'm afraid I still don't see how increasing the number of guns will help the security perception in any way; while the authorities have a hard time dealing with 10 sharp-shooters at random, imagine how much more trouble they would have with thousands of such guns.

The challenge isn't an armed militia here, or people with assault rifles; we've dealt with that with reasonable success in India, in Punjab, Assam, Mizoram and other places. The challenge here is armed bands of folks with _massive_ firepower - we're talking MP5's with 300 rounds of bullets - and it's next to impossible to say who's legit and who isn't. (Note that all the 10 terrorists had Hindu arm-bands and fake ID's from colleges in other parts of the country) I'm really sorry, I still don't see how increasing the number of guns on the street will help in any way.

Btw, for what it's worth, India's laws, if I'm not wrong, are roughly equivalent to those in, say, Israel; which is to say you're allowed guns as long as you take a licence. That said, the right to bear arms is a wholly American proposition with little or no consequence in the rest of the world; I don't wish to question your interest in, or enthusiasm for, guns, and do not expect you to understand why the rest of the world doesn't entirely see this in the same way you do. All I wanted to say was this: the Mumbai police was badly armed and had a shoddy fast-response, but it was engaging the enemy at every encounter. All reports I've heard point me in that direction.

Dubai doesn't have a long history of using its secret agencies to overthrow democratically elected governments and replace them with dictators more favorable to its interests, so I strongly doubt they're going to have problems with "terrorists" like Western nations have had.

Which is why, say, Muslim-ruled Saudi Arabia hasn't had any terrorist attacks. There have been no attacks on foreign workers, nor on resident families.

I doubt we'll ever know the true motivations of the scumbags who committed mass murder in India recently

You can accuse the perperators of many things, but a lack of clarity in their message isn't one of them:

LeT head Hafiz Saeed said at a rally in Karachi in 2000: "There canâ(TM)t be any peace while India remains intact. Cut them, cut them â" cut them so much that they kneel before you and ask for mercy."

That "they" (and I mean the greater "non-state" nexus using Islam as an excuse) hate _India_ and want to "liberate" previously Muslim-ruled states isn't conjecture anymore; it was amply clear, and indeed, was the stated goal of the so-called Deccan Mujahideen, who purportedly carried out the attacks. That Muslim mohallas across South Asia have become drastically radicalized is also not a matter of conjecture anymore; there are Islamicist "sleeper cells" even in otherwise idyllic, Muslim-majority Maldives. One of the most peaceful places in the world, the mostly uninhabited Lakshadweep archipalego which until recently had a mere 100 police constables, now needs augmented anti-terrorism monitoring stations. It's all very scary for all peace-loving, broad-minded citizens; I think the sheer fact is that governments across the region, both in Muslim-majority nations and otherwise, simply don't know what to do with it all. All our armies are trained to fight each other, not this.

I'll also say this:- I'm very very cynical about all this, but I do think we're past a certain tipping-point now, and the world in general, is on course for a collision of sorts. I don't see _any way_ in which things are tapering down at all; if anything, in this hyper-connected world where local crime-beat news makes international headlines, things tend to have a bigger impact than before. All news is global, all causes inter-linked; governments and societies simply don't know how to deal with all this.

see the recent article about how cartography can get you terrorism charges in India

Heightened times, people _are_ scared especially in the western border regions, but they were fully cleared by the Ministry of Defence beforehand. The local police has already given them a clean chit, although the state's Anti-Terrorism Squad is proceeding cautiously.

I'm actually more bothered about the Public interest litigation in Bombay High Court against Google maps. Citizens not connected with the executive have decided for themselves that Google maps needs to be censored. That is a worrying development; while the state can and will always try to increase regulation, in a democratic society, informed citizenry can and will fight back. It'll be a scary day when citizenry themselves start falling for the crap.

The only suicide bomber ever caught alive was in Bombay, where the brave police of DB Marg police station simply lunged at them:

Ombale rushed to secure him when the terrorist started pumping away with the AK-47. Call it guts or instinct but Tukaram Gopal Ombale refused to let go of his assailant. I am told that something like 30 bullets were recovered from his body.

Feel free to be afraid of being in India for all you want; that's your right. Feel free to give us suggestions on how to deal with the situation (although, I'm not sure how carrying guns would help in a situation where everyone's jumping nervously when a metal detector goes off). Feel free to accuse them of corruption and a general lack of weaponry, among other things. But don't, DON'T, ever question the bravery of the Mumbai police; there was some extreme heroism on display on those three nights there. I'll trust my life with these people before any armed band of vigilantes in Smalltown, US.