I don't know about the whole BRIC, but I've been practicing computer science for 13 years in India and haven't seen a single person use Linux as a desktop OS. Even as a server OS, people usually go for Windows instead of Linux, web servers being an exception. Most people just pirate MS products if they can't afford them. My two cents: MS realizes that people use mixed UNIX/Linux-Windows environments and that they're not going to gain any more market share by bashing open source, since it has 'arrived'. What they are trying to do is show interoperability with open source software, so that you buy Windows because it won't hate your Linux machines. Also, like everyone else, they're trying to build 'community' around the Windows programming environment, because that's where they've been lacking so far. ASP is losing to PHP because a lot more free code is available that can be quickly and lazily deployed. Another reason why this might be happening is because younger people who have grown up with open source software are now working at MS and they probably want to change the evil MS image.

What the Indian government needs to do is come up with a linux distro that will run on old discarded hardware and contain educational applications. A lot of the costs involved in building a new computer platform are redundant when there are already a bajillion old discarded PCs that one can buy for around $35. One thing Indians and most developing nations are good at is fixing up junk and making it useful. A government supplied distro that comes with educational videos, sounds and images, a local copy of wikipedia, and a simple platform that the masses can use for writing applications such as a grain price monitor, and a usable UI written in hindi (and later on in regional languages) can go a long way in achieving their aims.
The government already owns BSNL which has a huge cellphone network throughout the country, and they can start a low-speed internet plan (available only to those with a ration card). They can collaborate with someone in China (say huawei) to manufacture PCI cards and USB dongles that can use the GSM network for data.

The problem is not hardware as much as it is software and content. If you were to subsidize and hand a netbook to every child and poor person in the world today, you couldn't expect them to use it for educational or professional benefits. They'll just log on to facebook and watch Justin Bieber videos. Just recently we heard a story about how computer use does not correlate with higher grades in developed nations. What makes people think it would be any different for a developing country?

As a middle class schoolkid in India, I would've been delighted if there was something else apart from just black and white books that I could learn from. Instead of just reading about concepts, it would've been cool if I had access to simple videos of what an atom probably looks like and speeches delivered by mahatma gandhi. Or a simple geometry application in which you can draw circles and triangles to learn about them without wasting paper.
What India can do is get together a big enough team of developers, schoolteachers and social workers to write applications and compile content for this $35 computer, integrate it into an OS distribution that will run on any x86 processor above the 486 and is portable to other platforms, and then get NGOs to install this on old machines and deliver them to the poor. When they run out of old machines to use, then, maybe they can come up with a cheap x86 or ARM based laptop that has a cheap screen, a keyboard and a pointing device and can run this OS.
My point is that there are greater educational returns for the government of India in spending money in compiling a good software distribution and getting the masses involved early instead of starting another Simputer project that leads to nothing.
To those who do not believe a computer can be made for $35, I'd point to the cheap-ass Nokia 1000 series phones that are the mainstay of the cellphone revolution. These devices can still run simple applications such as games and e-wallets, etc., play MP3s, and some can even read flash memory cards. If one could just write some applications for them and increase the screen size, bingo.

What about a handcrank like they have on certain radios in Africa? ( http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/05/sonys_handcrank_1.php ) Sure it would take a day's worth of cranking to get enough charge for a mile of driving, but it still could be useful in an emergency.

"Hella" seems derived from hell and that would give the spelling of this huge number a negative connotation. Numbers are numbers, they should not have any connotation. That Groucho Harpo proposal has the same problem, it has a happy connotation. Not everyone would like to hear something like: there are Hella stars in the galaxy, or, I'm sorry to report but you earned Harpo dollars this month.

Compiz does need a simple Mac-style settings interface with optimal settings pre-fed along with the more advanced one. It takes nearly an hour to explore all options and select the configuration that will look the coolest for one's desktop.

Adding to your point, globalization has also increased the cost of living for the existing middle class here in India. People who do not work for IT or Real Estate here are at an economic disadvantage. Today, if I want to buy a drink in Hyderabad, I have to shell out at least $5 whereas when I was in a small town Ohio it cost me $2 for one. A Honda Civic here costs about $26000 and gas costs about $5 a gallon. Cigarettes are cheap, rent is cheap, but food costs about the same here as it did there. Healthcare and broadband is a lot cheaper because of lower monopolization. You fancy folk sure imbalanced our local economy. Food costs are rising as more and more farmland gets converted to shiny call centers or future sites for call centers because land prices have skyrocketed due to the perception of a growing economy.

To add to the pain, very little permanent development actually happens here in the field of IT and CS, since we're mostly doing monkey work and the local market for IT products and services is underdeveloped. Too many Indians, too few Chiefs. If I'm an Indian businessman looking to commission a developer for, say, an account system, I have to compete with the prices that US customers are paying. Very often what Indian IT consumers end up with is half-cooked and unreliable systems. When it comes to the point when the average Indian IT worker costs half as much as a US counterpart, we risk having the rug swept from beneath us, leaving a lot of poor and hungry people who drive around in their Honda Civics.

Everybody knows homebrew is the door for piracy. While the freedom crowd may advocate that one should be entitled to fully use the device they own, truth is that a large part of any console's cost is recovered by content, and without that cash innovation will die and/or consoles will become more expensive. Nintendo always owns a part of the Wii - they paid for it. I know it feels great to be able to play any game you ever wanted for free, but that's because it's easy to not see the food you're stealing off a video game industry worker's table and the despair of many kids who will not get to buy that new Katamari game because it's price got jacked up by ten bucks because of all the pirates. Behind that cartoon face of Mario lies an army of people: developers, marketers, testers, designers, etc that are trying to make ends meet and keep a job (by keeping a business afloat) just like the rest of us. It ain't just fun and games. Enough said.

What Nintendo needs to do is find a way to give out licenses and necessary digital signatures to small production houses and homebrew developers for nominal fees/free so that true homebrew on the Wii can be done in a legit way. How hard would it be for Nintendo to approve a few hundred true homebrew games every month? They're alienating a lot of fans this way, even if for the right reasons. And, this solution will last only the few weeks it takes Skullptura or Razor 1911 or whomever to find another backdoor.

They probably have a neat little compression algorithm figured out, something that works even better than video compression for 3d games. There is a lot more repetition in a 3d game, for example if you're running through a room in mass effect 2, you don't see too many new images (indeed you only see 3d transformations of the first images) compared to what you saw in the first 10 seconds if you scanned the room for enemies. But even if they've compressed it down to a few kilobytes going both ways, the input lag still seems to be the big problem, especially if you're trying to kill a formidable end boss.

The novel "Debt of Honor" by Tom Clancy, especially the chapter called 'Easter Egg' is about an event much like this one. A 'glitch' triggered by two corrected entires causes a loss of transaction data, and at the same time as the 'enemy' (in this case, Japan and other Asian investors) start selling US treasury bonds to bring down the value of the dollar and american stocks while increasing the value of the Yen. In response, the government rewinds all transactions to before the glitch was triggered and gets together with big european investors to start buying back the american trading vehicles hence shittified to increase their value, and so Jack Ryan (TM) saves the world.

The book is implausible in many places but is still an elaborate and enjoyable little drama about these events. I recommend reading it if this story intrigues you and you can tolerate the low-IQ cowboy politics.

That said, this does sound like a conspiracy. Surely there would've been a number of human as well as deterministic safeguards in place for the selling of a billion stocks instead of a million. The market was already spooked by the Greek bailout and going to lose a lot of value, and a well-timed 'computer mistake' was made to help shadow and muddle the apparent cause of some of this damage. Confidence would go down less, keeping the markets afloat somewhat better. For e-discovery purposes, the point-man who made this mistake would be made to look like he was torn to shreds by management, but would not be let go of permanently and will eventually be rewarded by whoever engineered the whole thing. A pretty good play if you ask me.

Either that, or the coke dealers of New York experimented with a new brand of baking soda to cut their product with. Technological advances happen all the time in all sorts of places in that city.

I haven't used it myself, but you might want to take a look at the Revolution programming language which has english-like syntax and seems to be more capable than Logo/BASIC as a beginner's language: http://developers.slashdot.org/story/09/11/26/2016255/Dumbing-Down-Programming . I hear it is being used in an academic setting to teach programming to Lit/Art majors.

'Showering' with buckets is actually not that bad. You end up saving a lot of water that way, and you can control the water's temperature more easily (as opposed to having to constantly adjust the hot/cold knob). I used to do it.

This can be a very dangerous weapon if 'the enemy' has mirrors all over their targets that reflect this laser. The invention would be similar to the NASA ballpoint pen if normal mirrors can reflect this laser beam to a non-negligible degree.

Secondly, How do you avoid innocent/friendly fire to those in the line of sight of the laser? Say, there's a village right behind the enemy unit you're targeting with this weapon and the enemy unit is moving faster than you can focus on it. 'Shooting' the laser willy-nilly can really fuck up the village. I guess that wouldn't be a problem if its used in Iraq and Afghanistan since the US army makes it a sport of killing so called Hadjis (thank you Jonny Quest) whether they be innocent or otherwise. In Iraq, it would fit with the drone quad quite naturally.
Still, very dangerous for all involved.

One potential use I see for this weapon (once it is miniaturized to gun size) would be as the ultimate Railgun. Imagine Quake 3 in real life. Running that fast would probably make me dizzy, though.

I know you're right and it does make sense - I also try to follow this line as well. It just feels that trust is worth so little between managers and employees when we are forced to either punch a clock or waste working time on performance reporting.

I'll always be in 2 minds on this one.

So for humans, would this mean when you have sex with your wife, you have to think of someone else for it to get up?

If you had read the article, you'd notice that his point was

A: We recognize writing mostly by the tops of the letter, rather than the bottoms.
B: Hand printing tends to have more recognizable tops than hand cursive, due to a lack of loops. Not to mention the B's, F's, S's, Z's and other letters that bare only a passing resemblance to their everyday counterparts.

Also cursive != all handwriting. You can still hand-print a note to a colleague, a loved one, or a doctor. You could also write in cursive. You could write in Insular Minuscule for all I care. The question is, is it as important to teach students cursive at the 2nd grade level as we have been doing? Or would it make more sense to teach it later, like an optional class in High School? Personally, I'd rather that time be devoted by my student to learning another language, especially while the language centers of the brain remain pliable.

And if, as you say, the grandparent poster has never seen beautiful handwriting... perhaps that is just further evidence of the futility of attempting to teach it to everyone?