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Comment Not so important in the context of India (Score 1) 138

This isn't so important in the context of India. In India political parties have better and more effective methods to influence the voters. One method that is currently the favorite is to bribe the voter. In the currently held election political parties were offering $8 to $16 per vote. Another method is called as "booth capturing". Where a bunch of goons or politically influential people storm a polling booth and start pressing the buttons on the voting machine in their favor. The prime ministerial candidate from the currently ruling party was caught doing exactly that. The penalty would be that he might have to privately apologize. Another popular method is to spread fear among the voters. Some employers have threatened their employees to vote for a particular party or risk losing their job. Most people are not aware that its a secret ballot and hence comply. May be its true too, who knows? The voting machine could be watching you.

The rich become powerful and the powerful become rich. Democracy is a charade.

Comment Yes (Score 1) 338

Yes, Internet is increasingly becoming an essential piece of infrastructure. Government should own the infrastructure and probably involve private players to lay, maintain and upgrade the network infrastructure.

How about Banking? Should Banking become publicly owned too? Or is Bitcoin the right model?

Comment Re:Best use for Windows 8.. (Score 1) 172

MS didn't fork because they wanted to make their desktop users (95% market share) *naturally* get used to and then gravitate to the windows mobile market (2% share). Windows mobile lacked apps and app developers. So they wanted to capitalize on their existing windows desktop app's and app developers by making them develop for the common windows 8 platform. As Ballmer said, Windows 8 is a big risk for MS. The risk that the mobile market may instead drag the desktop market share in its direction. Reducing the desktop market to ~2%.

Comment Re:Or alternatively (Score 2) 381

Wow!! All the standard Windows CLI tools are there? I cannot believe it! Now that's pretty impressive!! It makes me won't to go right now and buy a Surface 2. And its only priced at $449? That's a steal. And what's more? It comes from the trusted good old company, Microsoft.
Who wouldn't want to buy the new surface 2 or the surface 2 pro? I would jump for it. What's more? Order your surface 2 Or the surface 2 pro NOW and we will throw in a special edition Microsoft Office Live pack for free, along with a copy of the worlds favorite text editing program, the Notepad and many more nifty freebees including the famous 'xbill' game. Hurry now!!! Call 1-800-M$-SOFT.

Comment Re:Let me be 1 of the 1st here (Score 1) 478

What you describe happens if the company in question is a monopoly. It won't happen if the market has a Perfect Competition or even in an Oligopoly for that matter. In such cases the incidence of bad decisions is borne squarely by the share-holders. Like Nokia for example. Nokia outsourced its software development efforts to India, and who paid the price for that misjudgement?

Comment Re: Topology (Score 1, Interesting) 378

CDMA is a newer standard compared to GSM. CDMA is still protected with patents (Mostly held by Qualcomm). While a lot of the patents surrounding GSM have expired (?). CDMA is more efficient for the given bandwidth (both number of connections and energy), while GSM is based on time or frequency division.

In countries like India, government regulation ensured that CDMA players didn't get any advantages monetarily, due to the better bandwidth utilization, over GSM players. Thus, ensuring a slow death for CDMA.

Comment Re:Fingerprint it! (Score 0) 298

Yes, 20 symbols. The easiest way out, if pirating subscribers knew the pdf's are watermarked (and all pirates should be suspicious), is to take 2 or more copies, then take a print-out. Jumble the pages from different versions, add a few punctuations of their own, then scan them and upload.

If its such a popular magazine, a better method would be to make the magazine free and advertize to your advertisers about the huge circulation numbers and make more money from them.

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