galadriel

This is amazingly naive to think that we human have practiced anything close to what you state. From advent of agriculture, the practice has been to mix and match various plant species to get the best produce at lowest cost. We have destroyed huge amount of bio-diversity in the process. For example, of hundreds of banana species that existed, there is now only few, and all bananas are essentially clone of each other.

We have far left behind the days when agriculture was "natural", what ever that word means. The only difference that GM food bring to table is that we can now actively modify genes without taking a guess of what to mix with what.

Hating Monsanto might be understandable, but it only shows how patent system is broken, rather than a group of innovator being evil.

Don't like Monsanto, stop using them. Let them die without profit as no one would buy their stuff. But I guess great motive of money is stopping the "small" farmers from doing that.

You just pointed out one of the many reasons that world economies have moved past gold-based currency. Commodity based currency also runs risk to sudden discovery of new quantities of commodity (like South American Silver mines), which lead to economic impacts for no reason at all.

Microsoft has already shown a version of Office running on ARM natively. For lot of current Windows app written in .NET or standard Windows API, the transition should be easy so long as MS maintains the same API's across architecture. Only problem would be for old legacy software where company that maintained it is out of business, or software that heavily relies on kernel specific functionality, etc

No, US does it officially. One tenant of American immigration is that all countries around the world should be equally represented. US has a diversity quota, which is essentially a lottery, which is purely dependent on luck.

On the other hand, if you are "individual with exceptional ability", but were born in India/China, too bad, we cannot admit you without long wait times of 5+ years.

Thus, while US might provide amnesty (in future) to lot of low skilled labor, it hardly shows any enthusiasm for admitting entrepreneurs or skilled people.

India has no welfare structure, zilch, zero, nada. More than half of population has no sanitation, lot of children are seriously suffering from malnutrition; and good schools are available to few.

If you are an entrepreneur in India, most probably you were lucky enough to be born in 20% of 'richer' family of India, and more often than not, a failure might put you back with the rest 80%. That is too much to bet, especially in a place where start-up in Silicon valley sense is quite difficult to setup.

Can teachers be bribed in US to pass students ? (Just curious)

This would only work if the top level official wants bribe only for high level project. The approach would fail in India, where every amount of bribe has fixed distribution, from bottom most official to the top.

Say for example you wallet got lost, and you need to file an police report. The bribe you pay at police station would not be to the local official alone, but a cut of it would extend all the way over to top till the Home secretary. No one wants to punish anyone in such cases. This allows top-most official to acquire a much larger wealth than they would if they stopped corruption at lower level

Is there a HN Script to collapse comments like Reddit? I found a Chrome extension to do that, and I am thus using Chrome only for HN now.

PS: This is the extension. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1675861

I can only tell about my field, which is Physics, and a hard science field.

No, it is still increasingly hard to find a job (in US) from what I saw. Even getting to tenure track is achievement in itself. For example, any major top school (like Caltech, MIT, etc) train as many as one and half to two times the PhD students each year compared to department strength. MIT Physics, for example, intakes roughly ~25 PhD students/year for faculty strength of ~80. That's almost 125 PhD graduating every five year. There is no way all of them would find an academia job. Doing two postdocs is increasingly normal, and I know people doing three-four of them.

So yeah, there are surely lot of good people who are sucked into this broken system, and we sure need some fixes to it.

I am a masters student in an developing economy, who will soon join a PhD program in US, and I will do that after rejecting an analyst position at major banking firm.

For me, PhD makes sense because it would give me 4-5 tension free years of research with my PI worrying about the grants while I worry about science. Sure, job prospects might not be great for saturated market in US and Europe, but I hope I will be able to get a academia job back home or some place nearby.

I think system needs an overhaul to create jobs, and first step should be to decouple teaching from research. As there are only so many teaching jobs a university can provide, why not create independent labs? Max Plank institutes seem a fine model to me.

Either

a) Throw more resources at it. I am not sure how it is done, but cloud can scale on demand from what I know.

b) If not using already, use some static page serving plugin for Wordpress, like WP Super Cache or other. This should reduce some load.

They link seems to be down. Anyone has a transcript?

Ah, the joys that being born in right place brings for you. Anyways, that sort of stuff happens all over to million of people travelling everyday.

Let me recount my last year experience. My friend and I had to travel to Portugal for a summer intern from India. To keep transit headaches to minimum, I booked flights such that transits occur in Istanbul. No visa crap, just walk across to international transit and board the next flight. My friend on the other hand made a mistake to fly Lufthansa, and transit through Frankfurt.

Now, we were given a National Schengen Visa, one that was although granted under Schengen agreement, was valid only in Portugal and no other place. However, it allowed transit through other countries only while going to Portugal, and not while returning. Thus, my friend was detained in Frankfurt on his way back, searched and interrogated for 4 hours, and put on some Schengen no-fly list. OTOH, I walked like king in Turkey and enjoyed their hospitality.

So there you have it, all 1st world nations are assholes, including US, and I find it little hypocritical when somehow only US gets picked for it. I guess US is equal in discrimination of all people in transit.

True, but pirated Windows does not allows you to update automatically, and does not updates IE for you. Now, one can always download newer IE from Microsoft's website and manually install it, but chances of that happening are low.