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Comment Skip the software (Score 3, Interesting) 165

Just something from personal experience. I got my kid bunch of nice learning software for Android. He loved them, played them, learned a lot.

Then we had our student led parent teacher meeting/conference. Turns out, he doesn't do jack in class because he finds it all too boring. And it is, when he gets to race a car for solving the right question, sticking stuff with glue on paper is rather pale.

Result... he knows his stuff but is "officially" a C grade student. He is in grade 1 so no worries, however I will skip the software to tame his exitment level.

Comment Indian sweat shops (Score 5, Interesting) 441

I am an Indian. And he is correct for the wrong reasons. Western countries should actually do something about this, kind of like how they (at the very least) frown upon sweat shops of china.

Guys like him exploit young IT workers as they are starting their career trying to prove something. This results in 12+ hour working days and often weekends too. If AT&T pays some company in India to do some software, they need it done. the company in India treats these folks like work horses and 11:00AM to 11:00PM, 7 day a routine is quite common. Hence a 40 year with family with a PM around his age will say screw you and go to his kids. It has nothing much to do with tehcnologically relevant or not, so the 20 year slave labour does provide him more value. Not only does he work hours on end, he asks lesser money. A shit peace of software with a pretty interface is delivered to the client, non-techie iPhone generation business people see this bit, say, ooh look slide to unlock, this must be good, lets cut the check. Off to another client.

Anyhow, I am 37 and learned to say no to pushy managers long back, clearly I don't provide the value I did 10 years ago when 11-11 was the norm.

Comment Re:Disgousting behaviour (Score 5, Insightful) 560

This is very tricky, as a muslim I do think twice. What happens often and I know people who have no intention of funding terroists end up doing so. There is a Earth Quake in pakistan, loads of people give charity, some, few months later are declared supporting al-qaeda and this dude who cut a $20 check gets on the hook.

My own cousin, who would be the first to gun down taliban ended up doing so. My family is "main stream muslim" with some of my cousin with US airforce flying missions in Iraq and Afghanistan (ok one, but yah at least one). We do not support extremist at all. But it gets rather tough when someone is asking for donations for Earth Quake relief and that ends up going in the wrong hands. Often, these charities are declared supporting al-qaeda months after someone has donated.

I am surprised folks voted you Informative.

Comment God (Score 2, Insightful) 862

In my experience, discussion with a handful of atheist on and off led me to believe that they are only topped by extremists when it comes to discussion on existence of God. Majority of the believers are busy living a life and thanking God once in a while.

I prefer agnostics to atheist. Atheists, IMO follow a religion that does not believe in God.

Comment Re:South Park did it first! (Score 2) 610

hehe... I have one on my wife, time to time she wonders how i show up in malls where she is shopping.

More to the current, topic, I think this question needs to be asked from parents, slashdot crowd, al though teksavvy is, IMO the wrong crows. My views on parenthood changed after having my own. Instead of being pissed at parents with cranky kids in flights, I now sympathise with them.

As a parent, I wouldn't mind having one on my kids. I don't know the statistics, but its like thunderstorm, you wouldn't send your kid out in one, however unlikely, so given then choice, I would like something to track them easily.

Comment Lego Mindstorm NXT (Score 2) 246

This question keeps poping up on slashdot every once in a while!

Get him a lego mindstorm, let him build robots that he controls from his computer code, then flash the java firmware on it uses java instead of the OEM UI interface.

Mind storm http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx

Java firmware http://lejos.sourceforge.net/

Disclaimer: don't have fun instead of him. I find I play with my kids mindstorm just as much as he does.

Comment Re:If US policy is causing Muslim attacks . . . (Score 5, Insightful) 678

Having lived in India as well as Saudi Arabia and then moving to the west as a Muslim, I can answer that. And answer that is all I will do, it is not a justification for the actions in any way or form.

The answer is short, education. There is a huge populace of uneducated muslim's in the world, probably the highest percentage of the 3 major religons in the world. With education comes tolerance and understanding that so many lack. Since the 1960s, Saudi Arabia started preaching its brand of wahabism to a lot of muslims, not only at home but abroad. This gave you the likes of Taliban and extremist Islam was born. Afghans were know for revenge long before Islamist Islam took roots with Saudi Sponsored madarsas to drive away Russians (I will let you guess who thought it was a good idea to drive away Russians in this manner). All these uneducated fighters were given a cause to fight in the name of the religion.

Living in Saudi Arabia, one thing that is quite apparent is that they are very strict in terms of what they intepret Islam. Their religious police would come out at us with sticks if we dared play soccer during prayer time. This brand of Islam was exported with oil money to a lot of places and you get terrorism.

Not only that, a few corrupt indviduals will go murder innocent non-muslims in the name of Islam. The same breed of uneducated non-muslims would then go kill muslims and decades of enimosity lasts between societies and cultures. You get into a feedback look of hate and suffering exploding to sad events like 911.

IMO, this generation of terrorist cannot be enlightened, the focus must be to bring the new generation up with education and tolerance. Taliban know this full well and you get 14 year old girls shot, only if the west would realise this too.

Comment Re:Wow (Score 1) 273

I'm actually on CrashPlan which also offer unlimmitted, they haven't complained yet for about a TB of data. All you calculations are good, I have onsite backup as well, but I have digital photos of family/freinds for about the last 10 years which are about 150GB and then bought a 1080p camcorder about 4 years ago and that footage is already in excess of 500GB. So I really wanted an offsite backup to go along with backup on my NAS. 4 years of unlimitted storage costed me about $140 bucks. I am fortuante to have 7mbps uploads so the backup between 8:00PM to 8:00AM (my providers unlimitted usage hours) took about 20-25 days buy was done just fine. I tototally recommend it.

Comment Re:screw you guys... (Score 1) 196

Surprizingly I agree, I had the opportunity to play with some of the new prototypes given to developers and was really impressed. Having said that, it didn't seem like anything new except for a few interesting gestures to do stuff, but I would definitely say they caught up to the market. I do like the 9900 but just putting off from getting one in hopes of getting a BB10.Further, I find the new personal/corporate modes or whatever they call it interesting (the dev prototype didn't have this). Next year is going to be an interesting one in terms of seeing how RIM performs.

FYI, dev prototype is really a miniaturised playbook IMO. Apparently the BB10 has more, personal/corporate zone as an example.

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