adiM

As an Indian who grew up in a medium sized town in India and who has lived in a medium sized town in the US, I would argue that the US health system is much much superior to the Indian heath system. If you want to talk about private clinics in India, compare them with the treatment that you will get in the US if you are paying out of pocket (as you'd do in private clinics in India), or at least with what you'd get if you have a good insurance plan in the US. The quality of treatment in the US is much better.

People facing an expensive medical procedure may have higher chance of survival in India, but people facing emergency medical procedure certainly do not. Have you ever faced a medical emergency outside of the big metropolitan cities in India? My father had a cardiac arrest and he lost his life because neither the ambulance nor the hospital had a working defibrillator. And could not find one for the three hours that he was in the hospital (This incident took place in a state capital and not some tiny town). In contrast, the emergency response system in the US is amazing. Even the ambulances are well equipped with emergency care equipment.

I think that the more important question is, when another company wants to do space exploration in the future, will they also get access to NASA's expertise? Otherwise, the taxpayer's money has been used to create a barrier to entry for the (future) competition.

None of the tables have a column for Android, which, I guess, means that the author only looked at Apps available in the Android market and checked if other version of the App was also available. I think that it would have made for a fairer comparison if the author had also looked at Apps available from iPhone/BB/Win but not for Android.

I normally wear a watch, but still use my phone's stopwatch to keep time during a talk. I find that looking at a stopwatch during a presentation requires less mental distraction than: (i) keeping track of the time at which my talk started (I am talking about conference talks where the talks usually start a few minutes later than the scheduled time), (ii) looking at the current time and calculating how much time is remaining (it usually takes less than a second, but it is more time consuming that a tap on my phone).

The trick is to disable your phone's auto lock, open the stop watch and run it. That way, you can just tap the screen (I am assuming iphone like smart phone) to see the current time. I think this can be done as discreetly as checking my watch.

The biggest advantage of using a stopwatch is that it provides evidence of how long you have been speaking for. I have had cases where the previous speaker overshot his/her time and a session chair tried to get back on time by cutting time from my talk. In such cases, I have had to point to my stopwatch to say that I still have more than five minutes left. (Usually the talks are twenty minutes, so having five less minutes is a big deal). This (a session chair punishing me for the previous speaker's tardiness) has happened twice to me in the last year.