I had a Sikh roommate for 3 years and many Sikh classmates at the university. They were about as religious as non-Sikhs (my roommate was more religious), respectful and never bothered women. I am sorry to hear that your experiences fared worse. Alcohol? My roommate did not want to be in the room if I used a bouillon sachet with chicken extract that I had to stop. Neither of us ever touched liquors (not for religious reasons in my case).

So what if some Sikh youths are not religious and are hedonistic. Is this a “No true Scotsman” argument? Isn’t it normal in a modern society for youths to be less religious and grow more religious as they get closer to their mortality? Isn’t there room for cultural Sikhs/Hindus etc. who don’t place any emphasis on the supernatural?

My roommate brought up Sardar jokes on perhaps a couple of occasions. It’s OK in my book for Kushwanth Singh to tell Sardar jokes, for Russell Peters to tell Indian jokes and for Jon Stewart to tell Jewish jokes. Never heard of Santa Banta Ha-Ha-Ha till now. I did read of bara bajje jokes in a Kushwant Singh book.

What exactly does Khalistan achieve? What will it allow Sikhs to do that they cannot now? Impose a state religion? Is that the teaching of the gurus? (I read Sikh scriptures, here and there. I liked their open philosophical views which I thought were quite compatible with a modern society)

India is not yet a developed country. People of such regions are better off organized into large countries, as long as there is a fair constitution in effect. When splintered, they simply get taken advantage of on the world stage. While not robust, India has better leverage due to its size in ways that its neighbors (Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal) of similar development levels do not have. For richer countries, size matters less.

I will respond to this obvious troll since there is an informational opportunity. I went for gratis Internet classes in 1996 (gopher, veronica, archie - remember them?). The cybercafes were in full force by 1998.

Cheapest unlimited & WiFi Internet access now is $5/month. Rural areas get cheaper rates. Smartphone Internet plans are at $4/month. In India, even a poor man on a bicycle can afford a mobile phone. I know people in huts who have 3 of them (no, they are not being spendy). Unlike US, there actually is a free market when it comes to telecom and even the dirt poor of us can afford it.

Duuuude. I am assuming you are a Pakistani who still gets fed this propaganda, because nobody in India cares about Khalistan anymore. After that dark period of violence, the Sikhs have been well integrated. We cannot imagine India without them. Of all the states, they now have the most popular culture. Mine does not even register. We love everything about them. Get over it.

> If it's a medical term, then it has to have an ICD-10 code

As someone who has done clinical terminology work: not at all. Only a fraction of medical terms have representation in ICD-10.

> Java is slow*

As others have noted, this is completely wrong. Java bytecode, over a JVM in server config, after the JIT warmed up (which is the case for web apps), is very close to C++ in performance.

> Google/Youtube use python

Only for select portions of the site that see regular updates or have little logic (uploads, the labs potions etc). For the rest, they use a lot of Java, along with C and now Go.

Python and PHP web sites can be quite scalable. This is not because Python and PHP are themselves fast (they are 5-20 times slower than Java when run pure), but because most of the work is in fact done over C extensions (Python regex is actually a tad faster than Java regex because it uses a native module). If most of the CPU time is spent applying templates rather than any per-page logic, simply switching to a native templating engine works wonders. This is fine. I don't care where my code is run as long as I don't need to write managed code and I use Python a lot for scientific code without speed problems.

To query a database, run an XPath query, call a scientific extension or apply a template with native cheetah template engine, Python won't be much slower than C. But logic in Python itself is SLOW and it shows in a tight loop (not something web sites do much of anyway). So Python makes it easy to write C extensions without getting hands dirty (Cython, Shedskin etc). Put in another way, Python is a slow language (implementation, really) that does not let the slowness get in the way, most of the time. Same goes for PHP.

> * Yes, I know *in theory* in a certain very limited set of circumstances Java can be faster than compiled code, but the theory doesn't actually match the practical reality of the situation.

Many Java web frameworks do a lot more stuff than typical PHP setups. For example, I use ZK. It maintains the entire client UI model on the server. This is definitely not meant to scale. But the abstractions save me a lot of work for what I want to do.

Here are some recent benchmarks on how Java and PHP perform under load, especially when straight Servlets are used. No comparison.
http://www.techempower.com/blog/2013/03/28/framework-benchmarks/
http://www.techempower.com/blog/2013/04/05/frameworks-round-2/

> Disclosure: I run a high traffic website that get's millions of page views a day. Uses Yii php framework

But what does your site mostly do? Just serve static content for most part? with the pages filled with some straight-forward queried content? Yii framework looks like a basic MVC framework with few additional abstractions. It should not matter what language you use for something like this. I suspect that the same would be true for the OP. I don't disagree with your conclusions, just not for the same reasons.

The final advice to OP: Start with whatever takes the least capital. There are frameworks that have plugins for most of the common web stuff (Rails, Grails etc) and these are the right places to get started quickly. Hundreds of thousands of visitors/day is not much for modern machines. Even if the site is 20 times slow, clustering to 20 servers is cheaper if the slower, but more productive technology saves one developer year of work. A little optimization later will probably give you a lot of mileage later. Switching to a scalable architecture, using technology built for scalability like Go, Hadoop and NoSQL/HBase won't need to be concern until one is rolling in cash. They need more expensive devs. Premature optimization and all that.

> The right approach to software development is to do one thing and do that thing well.

There is no right approach. While that is the Unix philosophy, it does not suit every project's needs. Some projects like to have a most functionality to come from a single/few quality assuring source/vendor. This gives consistent quality, less updates to keep track of, consistent documentation, common interfaces across sub-components, one place to ask for help etc.

> Qt is becoming more and more bloated and duplicates a lot of other better and more specialized tools. It's shaping up to be a framework for everything

You can make the same arguments against most popular application (as opposed to system) programming languages. They all have, at varying degrees, wide reaching unified SDKs. Qt provides that aspect to C++ and many see that as an advantage. So yes, Qt moved from the GUI toolkit market space to a full stack C++ SDK market space. They now have a full suite, much like Java/.NET - complete with a modern IDE. Without it, C++ simply can't compete in this space... and IMO they should do a lot more to be a realistic alternative.

If all this does not appeal to you, you just aren't among the intended audience.

Also, Scribd loads pages just around the page you are reading. Useful on slower, metered connections for large PDFs. Registration requirement is still annoying of course.

> Something could have happened in international handling in Germany. Unlikely but not ruled out. A better designed experiment is needed

RTFA (I know, Slashdot). "Having run a series of control tests in Germany and Europe, which demonstrate no such bias, the problem appears to lie in the USA..."

> That means you do something and I witness it. Do you have a right to compel me to forget it ever happened? Of course not.

Yes. But the law is not targeting people, but rather systems. Organizations are not people as are not machines. Asking to be forgotten by such systems is not without precedent. A judge may expunge a juvenile's record on adulthood, for instance. The people who already knew of the juvenile's escapades are not demanded to forget the events, nor are they forbidden from being queried later; just the systems in question. The goal is not to rewrite the past, but to close certain channels of access (usually with known automatic triggers with unfair consequences) to it. All this sounds fair to me.

> Reason being copper theft. It's big deal.

Well. Here in India, Internet and cable TV use wires hanging between buildings, and have done so for decades. Theft is not really a problem.

The cheapest wireless internet we have is 256 kbps at $5 a month. That's quite adequate for everything but video. $10 for 1 mbps wired.

The important thing is for everyone to with the most basic literacy to be able to afford unmetered Internet *access*. Higher bandwidth is much less important. Upper tiers just get used for entertainment and are not critical.

I feel that making basic Internet access at limited bandwidth (256 kbps is fine, 1mbps is better if we are to target online education), available as free as radio waves or water, is a better goal than 20 for 20 by 20.

Mobile phones are already very cheap here. Incoming calls are free. Outgoing call balance can be recharged with cards as low as 50 cents. So a poor family living in a hut with a leaky roof can still afford phones for each of its members for essential use. Internet should be as affordable as that and it will surely get there here without any ITU directives.

> 1.5mbps is insufficient to stream with decent quality these days without spending a ton of time waiting for the video to buffer.

Where there is a will, there is a way. Most of you are just spoilt with high speeds and forgot how resourceful you can be (I learned my tricks in dial-up days) :-). I am in India now with a 1 mbps connection ($10/month). I can get faster Internet and can afford way more. But I chose not to for reasons I won't go into now.

I just use browser plugins, downloaders or my own Python scripts to download videos and watch them offline (since I get annoyed when video redownloads when I skip around). Yes, not everyone will want to do this. I have downloaded plenty of MOOCs and Youtube conference presentations here. Youtube introduced WebM, which compresses better. I have a greasemonkey script to get them. I can watch a 480p WebM video (360p mostly works for small text on slides. 480 is perfect) in realtime as it downloads.

I used my own (there are some published scripts too, but I wanted custom renaming etc) Python scripts to batch download some Coursera videos (they are very well compressed 540p mp4s since most of the window is just a whiteboard with little movement. 10 min is around 11-15 MB. BTW. 1 mbps is plenty for realtime viewing) and Youtube lecture playlists. I also video conferenced with 6 people at once while working over RDP - all at 1 mbps.

I think I can get by with even 256 kbps ($5/month) except for conferencing. I would just download the lectures overnight. What I care more about are bandwidth caps (Most Coursera courses aren't more than 2 GB. So that's not a real problem either) or service outages.

Its also not that I don't know what speed means. As I left US, I was using 100mbps at the university and downloaded 60GB of various public research datasets over just a few hours that I would not download from here. I am not suggesting that low bandwidth is something to look forward to. You can see that I am wasting some time working around it. But as bandwidth increases, even though it changes the way we work, it only provides diminishing returns. For one, the time saved not working around would be replaced by entertainment temptations, at least for me.

As long as there is connectivity, speed is mostly not a show stopper. That said, Americans should demand more bandwidth given the tax dollars that went into the infrastructure... just not for MOOC reasons.

And its a pretty good argument too. I don't care how the devs wanted me to enjoy their product - I don't fit the psychological profile of their target demographic. I will choose how best to get value for my money.

Take RTS games. I don't care about the "challenge". I don't care about winning or losing in video games. Too stressful and too much of a mundane grind for something that is supposed to be fun. Instead, I just use them as a domino set - Set em up, knock em down. Accumulate lots of units and save... from a safe perch, I like to see if I can take down the enemy base using my own rules about units and tactics from there (Company of Heroes). Or just play specific sections of long levels (Men of War). I like the little explosions and other physics effects. Why should the devs care about how I use their product as long as they got the money and I as long as I am not using cheats on another player.

Most games have some great moments with a lot of replay value and loads of filler content that life is too short for. Saves allow one to savor the good bits and not waste time on the failings.

I just don't see how he can be severely punished by any court at this point without diminishing itself. At least from the comment sections of major US/International news outlets, the court of public opinion (arguably skewed) is firmly against any major sentencing and that he had suffered enough already. Anything more than a few years will not be good for the international image.

@LordLimecat

Another Protip: When someone uses a neat statistic on Slashdot, you can be pretty sure that they pulled numbers out of thin air.

@ FriendlyStatistician

> Have you read 1984 recently? A huge part of the plot revolves around the protagonist thinking he was safe

Its been a while. I remember this part well. Hence the post.

> when he was in fact being watched on camera the entire time.

That I did not remember much of. Just that he was betrayed the whole time by people (although I vaguely recall the discovery of a camera in the capture scene and him retracing his memory to being watched). But hey, I don't reread classics to make web posts :-).

> you'll find most people won't want a camera shoved into their face

This is worse than 1984. In Oceania, one at least knew where the cameras were and could at-least try to avoid them.

> basically the entire public space is under surveillance all the time

Reminds one of the scene in The Matrix, where Neo is identified when the avatar of a homeless guy just sees him. So long privacy. It was nice knowing you.

Other thoughts...
- Google will agree to not track or store (less likely) faces unless consented to... sort of like Google Maps blanking faces
- Allow friends to follow you... literally, as you get detected by the crowd cams (why not? for some reason, people already let their online lives tracked by social media)
- Subscribe to FBI's most wanted list, local missing people.