hooeezit

You missed the part where it's unencrypted HTTP traffic. So, any 'malicious party' sitting at a café with free wifi.

Emirates gets a big chunk of their revenues from EU customers. They definitely don't want to piss of EU regulators. As for US regulators, they've been at odds with them for some time, so Emirates will probably try to fight them before giving in. But this particular privacy hole is the size of a crater - it will be hard to fight the regulators. In fact, as a software architect, I feel that the solution is far cheaper than fighting regulators.

Where they are based doesn't matter. If they are collecting revenues (taking payments) from EU clients, it applies. That includes generating ad revenues from EU based eyeballs. When it comes to on-ad-generating, free websites, it remains to be seen how bold EU regulators get. It'll be hard to penalize or prosecute such websites, and there are enough violations in the fat cats anyway, so I'm guessing those free websites will get a free pass for now (pun intended).

Pride. To tackle the political corruption issue will require a massive movement and a big consensus. If you visit India, you will realize that nothing gets done through consensus. Only individual actors achieve large successes. India still lives in a kingdom mindset where people draw pride from the acts of their superiors and are thankful for such acts. If you try to do something radically different, you will get a lot of resistance from everyone around you because "that doesn't work here". But if you do succeed, everyone around will claim to be part of it and will talk of you proudly.

So, in that environment, building an ICBM (which is btw a very hard engineering challenge and took India 30 years) is an achievable goal for an individual actor (the defence organization DRDO) and because it was an Indian success, brings pride to a nation of 1.2 billion. Getting rid of corruption will make our lives significantly better (there are many other much more modest goals that will have a similar effect), but it won't bring close to as much pride. In a country where you'd die before driving a Tata Nano if you had any semblance of money (Tata Nano is seen as a cheap car - something not to be proud of) and an iPhone is a must have, such sources of pride as an ICBM count for a lot.

Yes, we are flawed, but as we say, "what to do, we are like this only"

If you didn't know, India and China HAVE fought a war in that region, and you always fight wars 'at the end of supply lines' by definition, so not sure what you mean by that. In fact, both countries have the ability to fight extended wars. India has been fighting a war for decades on its western frontier with Pakistan which is as rugged as the eastern frontier with China. India maintains the highest battleground presence in the world on the Siachen Glacier. So no, the prospect of a land battle on the Indo-China border is neither unlikely, nor unprecedented.

That said, modern China is a pragmatic country whose primary focus is to keep its own population happy. China has a lot of hurdles in the path to the realization of that goal, and needs the economy of the region to stay stable for that. If China attacks India (or vice versa), global supply chains and economies will get severly affected and in turn will have an avalanche effect on the economies of both the countries. Hence, practically speaking, neither countries would wage war on each other unless taken over by a whimsical, dicatatorial leader (and which dictator isn't whimsical?).

The critical parts to being an entrepreneur are to build a product, raise capital, manage a company and sell the product. For each of those pieces, you need a good professional network. Co-founders to build a product are easy to come by if you are studying for an engineering degree, but finding people for the other 3 pieces of the puzzle are equally or more important and are difficult for an engineering student. So, you have to spend an incredible amount of time networking both within the town/city you are in and in other major tech hubs. You will need to search for and attend every possible free/cheap gathering of techies and through them find people to help with the 'other 3 pieces'. But then there is this other big hassle that looms over everything else.

American immigration laws are specifically designed to keep people out, and that is the biggest barrier you will face. The only way around it is to find a local co-founder and sponsor an H1B visa through the company showing yourself as an employee. There have been recently proposed changes to the H1B rules allowing a sole founder to sponsor their own H1B provided they have investors investing in the company and the company has a board of directors. You will also need to wait a little for enough such cases to go through the USCIS to determine what's the winning formula for such H1B visa approvals. In parallel with all of your other efforts at finding people, you will hence have to find a good immigration lawyer who will also work on a project basis at low rates. Of late, USCIS has be onerous in demanding documented evidence for H1B cases, so you can very well rule out applying entirely by yourself.

The gist is that although it's possible, it's very hard to be an entrepreneur straight out of college if you are not from the country. The shortest route is to fall in love with an american (citizen) girl and marry her. And I don't say that in jest.

I was around in 2001-2002 and again in 2008-2009. I needed visa sponsorship. Yes, there were jobs available, but few where the employer was willing to sponsor a visa. I had many interviews where the employer was jubilant at the end of the interview, and then 2 days later, HR called to tell me that they won't be taking on anyone who requires visa sponsorship. Recruiters told me that I would be immensely valuable once I got my green card. So, yes, you should be worried. Especially if the market keeps going down. But there is a ray of hope. The new rules tweaks from the USCIS give people like you a lot of breathing room. You can sponsor your own H1B visa if you build your own startup and have a board that has the ability to hire/fire/manage you. The American Immigration Lawyers' Association (AILA) is still working on understanding the tweaks, and there won't be much clarity until a few visa applications are approved or rejected based on the new rules. So, it will take at least 2 months to get clarity. Start looking for jobs through your professional network (build one if you don't have one), and start looking for a good immigration lawyer. I could actually help with the latter. Online jobs websites are mostly useless until you have a green card.

Python on Android would be my preferred option. But I've yet to look at Scala and Ruby, so if they become available on Android, I'd definitely try that. I have 3 android devices, but haven't gotten around to programming them because I hate Java.

For those in the US, a googly is a way of delivering (pitching) a ball in Cricket. The American equivalent terminology would be 'throwing a curveball'

Looks like what you want is a version of this: http://techlens.cs.umn.edu/tl3/

Read an article about Techlens on ACM here: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1297268&dl=GUIDE&#...

Looks like you need more than just an oscilloscope - you need a trend recorder. The DSO Nano is a great for casual work, but if you have some electronics skill, you can easily build an attenuator to hook into your laptop's microphone or line-in (1 channel or 2 channel) jack and record the signal for trend analysis. You can also use an MP3 player with recording abilities as long as it records to a WAV file, not MP3 directly.

Take a look at these links: http://www.ledametrix.com/oscope/index.html http://www.zelscope.com/

And if you grow out of it, this is a very hackable, real oscilloscope for an affordable price: http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.30573

Here is info on hacking the Rigol to make it a 100MHz scope: http://mightyohm.com/blog/2010/03/rigol-ds1052e-50mhz-to-100...

Man, you hit the spot with the article chain! Your advice is way better and concise than many books I've read. I second tptacek's comment about Liability Insurance. I needed it 6 months into the process. Thankfully, General Liability is all I needed, and the process wasn't so painful.

Cool to know there are so many iPhone developers doing well in the Twin Cities. Found out about @akardell through @dcgrigsby's tweets. Any other iPhone hackers around the Cities?