And it's not just alcohol.

Little example: You are walking the street. The street is nicely covered with cameras, everything is recorded by the police. Some guy comes to you and robs you of your wallet and phone. As expected, this crime is properly recorded.

So, you go to police to file "what ever it is called" and expect police to find the perpetrator and give you back your wallet and phone. Should be easy, right?

Well, in reality they will simply try to convince you they can't do anything about it because "there are lots of such small incidents and even IF they do look at the tapes, and even IF they do successfully identify the guy, and even IF they do find him quite quickly, you wont get your wallet and phone back - wallet would be long since empty and discarded somewhere and phone sold". And even getting the man to court would be quite ... expansive and the resulting conviction ... unsatisfactory.

In IT terms, cameras do not scale properly and small criminals are flooding them so much that they are not effective.

So yes, sometimes cameras can help with something big. But otherwise they are not helping and can be hugely abused (if not already).

IMHO.

So, the big multinational company tries to leave your region and wont hire you unless you are willing to leave to say India too.

So, you stay in U.S., for now unemployed.

You would be thinking "What should I do now?" You should remember, how the U.S. started - colony, 3rd world country, pioneering, hard work, ...

So you should simply begin to care for yourself: start your own small company, be self employed, ...

While doing so, you would realize how much you're paying to the state and what you get from state in return. So you will push the state to drop the "services" which do not have good price/benefit ratio. Like all the stuff which some big copanies lobbied for themselves at the expanse of small people.

And you either succeed or die.

I guess you would succeed, but of course only because you are skilled and work hard.

And IBM? They can lobby also say in India. They might even make same stuff happen to India as previously U.S. and India will become the world power. But if the ways of IBM do not change, India will too grow "over regulated" and thus "too expansive" and they will move on.

Good things:

• Those who are skilled and hard working will survive. (applies to people both in U.S . and elsewhere)
• It will push states to optimize - dropping unnecessary bureaucracy, pointless "political quest", unwanted military campaigns, ...
• Companies have to adapt also to a long term survival - if they succeed only if they abuse the country they are based in, soon they will run out of countries they can relocate to.

Bad things:

• This "self regulation" takes a looong time. Balancing of the U.S. and the rest of the world, the people in U.S., the people elsewhere, ... wont happen throughout the night.

There's "easy" solution: You are a telco with declining number of subscribers on landlines. So, just take those billions of dollars you got few years back to upgrade your network to deliver next generation broadband speeds. Use them to upgrade old telephone lines into new "packet tubes" and migrate your old telephony system onto those new "tubes". And here you go: one infrastructure which is going to make you money as ISP *and* which will allow you to operate the "old telephony network" almost for free.

Something similar to what has been used for allowing analog TVs to receive digital TV can be used to connect old analog phones into new digital network.

Unless I'm mistaken and/or too optimistic. :)

Well, example from Slovakia (part of EU): When (not if, when) the minister causes too much trouble (like say stealing so much that it is impossible to cover it up) he gets kicked out. But hey, his comrades wont let him fall on the street. He gets a new job as a member of parliament - usually position with much less work but better pay.

Now, I just wonder where is the motivation for a minister to do a good work (for the citizens).

Aren't they already?

Because, there was a story, that if you look (hard enough) into say Pi, you find your latest favourite Hollywood flick in there somewhere. So DMCA or something similar might be used to forbid you from even possessing a Pi number computed to a big fraction.

I guess (I have to, I do not have mathematical proof) that similar argument can be made also for any big enough random number.

So, RNG generator are not only "munitions" but also a "devices for creating copies of copyrighted works".

note: Yes, I'm joking here. But in some court rooms it might not be taken as a joke. I guess.

After reading the article I can say "me too".

Now I just have to take a look at all the open source projects I'm releasing ... :)
(almost none but not zero)

The price discrepancies you mentioned have nothing to do with Indians as per their nationality/place they live and everything to do with whom you're buying from and what nationality/where you live (US) you are.

The "beauty" of import/export/retail is, that you simply haggle for the price, charging different people in different places different prices.

Example: We are in the US, I see you are a wealthy American so what do I charge you? If you are really eager to get my stuff, I ask hight price. If I see you are not interested, I offer it for lower price. The only part of that, where my production cost of the item comes into play is when you are really not interested: then I have to be really careful so as to not to sell you the item bellow my cost.

But that's it.

You pay more in the US (for the items in examples you gave) because:

1. you can
2. you are willing to

Btw, in Slovakia (where I'm from) there was a time, when a same piece of furniture in one global company costed almost twice as much in Bratislava then in Vienna (we can say, almost "next village", half an hour drive) while in Slovakia the average income was a fraction of the average Austrian income. How's that? Because Slovak people were willing to pay the price. :)

Well, yes. On Linux platform, there are usually choices. And it's not uncommon that the choices are unclear, no straight winner, ...

But being and application developer and targeting Linux then one has responsibility or privilege - depending on how you look at the problem.

If I'm a user, its really quite hard or nearly impossible to choose say sound system. OSS? Pusle Audio? ALSA? ...? After all, I just want to hear something from my machine without hickups or any other distortions.

But if I'm application developer for say some sound oriented application? Well, I'm already on totally different level when it comes to competency to choose a sound system: I'm not only able to simply listen to what I hear from the machine, I'm also a programmer with some knowledge about this and that.

So as developer, I have to (and should) choose which sound system to target thus helping end users to decide which one to choose.

Of course, in short term it leads to some conflicts - you get the machine and one sound application wants OSS, another Pulse, ... But after some time (i.e. few iterations later) we will have a winner. Because:

• user choose apps (thus usage scenarios, ...)
• application developers choose subsystems (which works best for the target user base and the developers building for them)
• subsystem developers will try to provide as much BANG as possible to the app. developers and their users

Thus, best susbsytem(s) will win. Because the best app. choose them and drive/help them. Because users want the best apps.

So, Google (and any other developer) should investigate options available and decide, which one to support based on what is best suited for the needs for their users and also best suited to be used for development. In that way, some options will get eliminated (by simple lack of attention), others get pushed up (additional attention will help them become better), some options will merge (and either strenghten or vanish).

So please, make a choice.

This reminds me of a story from a bank few years ago:

A software company has developed a trading system for the bank. One of bank mid-managers was very keen of the product and supported it strongly because it was going to have a nice feature: reports about all the trades on per employee basis so that at the and of month, year, whatever it would be very easy to see who make the most money for the bank (and who the least).

His backing for the project ended abruptly right after the first month of the deployment of the product when the stat results were for him ... well, not very favourable.

The Welfare State We're In (another link) describe parts of current governmental policies which while maybe meant to be good, fail miserably. Some of them are the areas you mention.

That of course only if a) I understand you post correctly and b) I'm not mistaken about the book and author (I did not read it, I've just read some longer summary of it, then forgot the exact name) - hopefully sufficient for ./ posting :)

By the way, I do not say that paying taxes is either good or bad but I do tend to agree with you if I take a look at the current (or I can even say almost any) government of my country and see what did they achieve with all the money the taxpayers are paying.

Please, just do not let it drop into the river, lake or ocean!!!

Quite dumb-proof, isn't it? :)

_____________

Btw, its ice-nine by Kurt Vonegut if anybody is wondering.

Two things:

1. snoop back
2. hide behind your own corporation (a.k.a. contractor)