Once upon a time I worked for a mega city gov as Linux consultant. I had to quit in disgust after the antivirus sales people mcpaid brainwashed the managers to put it on all linux server. As if it was not bad enough that they were running production systems on Vware. I made an good effort to educate the managers by showing them various articles from wiki and explaining the unix design but failed. Vware is another story, I showed them bonnie++ throughput measurement for disk io on a desktop vs a guest on highend esox. From my perspective looked like they deserve each other, but obviously huge kickbacks were involved. Both parties were benefiting each other at tax payers expense. By experience(15 years) I have learnt that whenever such illogical stuff takes place on a large scale you know that recession is around the corner.

Am I not free to do that, Say I am s0ny and I provide top 10 ranking and 8 on the list are produced by s0ny. If people don't like it then they are free to go to 3ftv rankings where only 2 of s0ny's songs are in the top 10 list.

Help me understand here - Is not this like saying, If I provide top10 song rankings and I put Spice girls song at no.2. EU does not like that and sues me to put her song at no 1.

The article looks like an advertisement to me. Just like Verizon vs Att. Here bing/yahoo vs google in the lines of Nigerian scam.

I completely agree. Whatever is born, must die. He seems to have forgotten Newton's third law - To every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction: or the forces of two bodies on each other are always equal and are directed in opposite directions.

Foreign students excel in American Universities. Therefore it is not higher education fault.

I am a foreigner and since I come from different background I feel that I understand what is wrong with education system here. I have a 6 year old son in USA. He went to Kindergarten at the age of 5 and I was amazed that he is getting graded and taught to spell and recognize words cut put etc.. etc.. I felt this is so wrong to teach children at such young age. I had hoped that K will be mostly play, activities and story telling. After 2 months I withdrew him from the school because I am sure if I had continued then it would have destroyed any imaginative/creative abilities he might be having. He will rejoin K this year.

Quoting Albert Einstein - Imagination is more important than knowledge.

At age 5 the brain is not fully wired(especially boys). Kids memory part is excellent at age 5. The analytical ability develops at a later age(left and right brain have to connect). When we teach kids to memorize and learn, their brains get trained to use memory to learn and thus the analytical brain will never be challenged or used at later ages. They will excel(by reading early) in early classes, say K3 etc. but when they grow up they will not have decision making, logical analysis abilities and will most likely end up at fast food chains taking orders. The best education systems in the world start teaching kids at age 6 or 7. For example Finland.

fantastic analysis, I wish to add little more philosophy to this - If I kill myself then I will save the planet and the environment a lot, so who ever says "save the planet" they should kill them selves first.

To even think that we are in some way superior to the planet and have the ability to decide the fate of our planet is very short sighted thought process. Earth controls us, not the other way. Just enjoy the virtual existence and die the virtual death. I am from the planet, planet is me and I am the planet. The person typing this is a mere virtual identity having no real existence. My body is real and so is the planet, rest is virtual.

So what you mean is that if we get rid of insurance then price should be 100 usd. I was rasied outside usa in another country, so as an outsiders perspective, what I observed here is that people are very very afraid of everything here. From Insurance to Pharma companies, are ripping out money using that fear. When a robber holds a gun and takes away money, people complain immediately. But people are willingly opting for getting robbed by the Insurance industry.

I had employer provided insurance for one year and withdrew once I realized that 1/4th of my salary was being paid by my employer for Insurance. Medical Science can't cure infectious diseases. You would be asking for a very miserable death if you opt for treating infectious diseases other than cuts/bruises from accidents. And penicillin is the medicine for cuts. Medical Science is very good at treating injuries or at surgery. They don't have a cure for anything else. Cuts etc treatment doesn't cost much out of pocket. Surgery is normally a planned activity, so one can always go to another country and get it done for less than 10k. There is no gurantee that one won't die from a car accident today, but we don't worry about it. Similarly there is no need to worry about death from infections. Insurance or no-insurance it does not matter in case of infectious diseases like malaria or TB. There are two outcomes, either you die in couple of months among loved ones or die a very very miserable death in hospital and after bankrupting your loved ones for one or two years.

One more important point is never to take any medication for fever. Fever is our own army, we should not kill fever. I am 36 years old and have been to the dirtiest countries in my life. I know I got infections too because I got fever, and fever has always cured the infection and me without any medication. Taking medication for fever is the worst thing one can do to himself. Taking medicines is equivalent to drinking dishwasher detergents. You are a big colony of bacteria too, so it will kill the bad bacteria in you and half of your good colony inside you. Body's immune system is far superior beyond anyone's imagination, help it and help yourself.

I hate people who work on weekends. Working on weekends means you were not smart enough to finish your work in the allocated project hours. If the project plan is poor and the work is impossible to complete in the regular allotted hours then lodge a complaint with your seniors or the HR and get your Project Manager fired. Freshers like you are generally not smart enough, that is understandable but if your PM also rewards weekend and late hour work then people like you will be inducing an weekend work culture. If that happens to me, that is, if my PM forces me to work on weekends, yes I will do FTP during regular hours. FTP stands for - Full Time Pass. If the FTP privileges are also curtailed then I will start looking for a new job. Simple rule - Time = Money. We earn money to earn Quality time, not the other way i.e. give away the weekend quality time for money. I regularly fire freshers who end up working into weekends.

A keyboard is an absolute must for me. I hate touch screen keyboards. This is the reason I never bought any of those fat iphones. The best phone till today with 5 row keyboard is the htc g1. The other full keyboard ones are running stupid windows os. Droid and Nexus have impressive specs but does not have the basic functionality where I can type numbers without any additional effort. And yes I do type numbers very often. So G1 still beats all the phones out in the market as of today.

That is exactly the point, there is no such technology (which we have invented) which already doesn't exist in nature. In fact, it exists in nature at a far superior level. There is infinitely superior technology even within a blade of grass. What we do is just emulate the technology in nature on a human scale(large) but in a very crude form. For example human body converts a variety of food into energy and we convert some crude forms(crude oil) in a very inefficient way. We all were once part of a ball of fire(lava).

Invention is nothing but discovering nature's technology and replicating it in a crude form on a human(larger size) scale. Infinitely superior technology already exists in the tiniest of particles. He who thinks we are technologically advanced is nothing but an Ignorant idiot.

I was a slackware guy in 1997/8 then Redhat and now Fedora. I am a sysadmin and some one requested me to troubleshoot nfs service on Ubuntu and I figured that it was a dhcp issue and fixed it by restrating the network service and thus nfs. But still have no clue where it stores the ip info. I was busy so gave up after about 15 mins of googling. Nfs service was also way different than on Fedora. Ubuntu service organization kind of looked old school 1997's Slackware type. I may be wrong but one thing is for sure I too don't want to try Ubuntu. I am a command line guy, so I judge distros on how well their files are organized, so I would say Fedora's file system organization is the best.

I am in a similar 24/7 sysadmin position. I am an hourly contractor and this is the best for such positions. Any call received after working hours will trigger my billing meter. July like a taxi meter the minimum for even a 5 mins call is 1 hour. If you are an employee then you are screwed.

Last recession taught me it doesn't matter how skilled you are, it is the "demand and supply market" that decides your fate. If you happen to be at the wrong company at wrong time, you will just get laid off. Skills do not matter at all. I work as a contractor, till 2007 I was with a city government, and I knew budget cuts are coming. Once you get laid off due to budget cut there will simply be no openings. So I switched early in May 2008 so that I have a contract through the recession. Recession is learning time, all your arrogance and ego at being skilled will vaporise. I am not sure if my contract will get renewed this year. But I have gone through one recession, if needed I will work at a gas station from day one but will not dip into savings, err. have no savings but have no loans either :-) Last recession taught me not to use credit cards and to prepay loans. Pre-Paid my 20000 car loan in 2 years(2007-2008). Installments were 400 but I paid 1500 a month. Sure I would have had savings if I had not done that but also more worries. No debt no worries. It would be a good time to take a vacation to third world countries where living is dirt cheap. For around 300 usd a month, you will get house, food, clothing and some entertainment too.

Belief is nothing but accepting some one's lie as truth. That is lieing to self.