abhaga

That programmers don't change their opinion about types. He did.

They are rather straightforward to reimplement

Not really. Very often you will find the crucial details that make it work missing. Not sure if things have vastly improved over past 5-6 years.

> can not already joining it in hordes. Sorry, I can't figure out what you meant here.

Yes, typos are hard to process, especially when you have context. I meant "are not already joining."

Are you defining privileged as those people who do not agree with you? Because in economic, social and other terms, I fail to see how those supporting FreeBasics are any less privileged. In fact, they are the top of the privilege pyramid.

And here's the thing. All these bleeding heart pro-poor telcos in fact want differential pricing so that they can charge more for VoIP services. How does that tie-in with this narrative of poor people?

Replace FreeBasics by a targeted scheme with measurable outcomes and provisions for how it will auto dismantle as it achieves its goals, and then let's talk. Otherwise it is all baloney.

You speak as if those not on the internet can not already joining it in hordes. And those opposed to FreeBasics are somehow holding the keys.

When looking at the two camps here, you seriously believe the motives of Facebook and Telecom companies that have clear business interest in having users locked up in their walled gardens but doubt the intentions of a motley group of activists including startup founders, university professors, policy experts among others who do not have any direct incentive to oppose people coming on to internet and also do not control that access in anyway?

Because it is not a static scenario. Internet users in India grew by ~30% over last one year itself and that growth is not slowing down. And FreeBasics is not limited to people coming on the internet for the first time.

If those opposing the FreeBasics are trying to decide on behalf of poor, isn't FreeBasics itself not doing the same thing?

In fact the word play now is just ridiculous. When questioned about the above, they point out that this is an open platform now where any service can come in. When questioned on why not simply give free capped bandwidth then, the answer is that "basic internet services" like education, health are more important for poor. And if left to themselves, they will spend all bandwidth on things like porn. (The last statement is not from Facebook but from certain supporters of FreeBasics)

In the FB vs Orkut example, not only is the Orkut Free, FB is inaccessible to Orkut users. What do you think will be the outcome then?

You are also assuming that if not for Free Basics, there will be nothing done to increase the internet spread in India. As those opposed to Free Basics have repeatedly pointed out, there are other better options available.

You are assuming that the other services can just wait it out while people break out of FB ecosystem and discover them. Development of these kind of walled gardens significantly harm the development of independent services. That is one of the main problem. If everyone had free Orkut and no access to FB, how long would it have taken Facebook to catch on?

Yep. We don't want you to see our elephants and tigers. And the snake charmers.

I understand that there are a lot of people who care about chocolate and who don't care about banana. I know plenty in the other direction (majority around me).

But there are two points. First is that you are underestimating the kind of role a crop can play in a culture. It is not just a matter of replacing Banana with another crop. It is a matter of changing significant cultural traditions going back hundreds of years. If you think about it, the importance of chocolate is also largely cultural.

Second, it is a philosophical debate that what is more important - something that is basic nutrition for one group or something that is cultural/emotional/luxury/(I can't find the right word for the role chocolate plays) for another. Where the resources will be allocated will depend on who controls those resources and which camp they fall in.

Actually bananas are a huge deal since they provide the basic nutrition for large populations in many parts of the world. Also Cavendish is the dominant set of varieties world over and there are not many real substitutes for it, yet.

With diseases, world might actually run out of chocolate or at least some varieties of it. Like Panama disease wiped out Gros Michel banana and is now also threatening Cavendish banana. Similarly Frosty Pod Rot seems to be spreading and threatening cocoa plantations.

Yeah but the DELETE blocking affects any customers on this ISP as well. I am now working on moving to SSL asap.

Problem is often the competence of people handling these proxies. Yesterday I discovered that my ISP is blocking all DELETE http calls (ACT fibernet in India)!

And before that they decided to enforce a reverse DNS lookup so all the name based virtual servers with local DNS entries stopped working - I had my staging instances setup that way.

And not only all this happens without any prior information, it is next to impossible to climb through the support layers to finally find someone who even understands what are you talking about. They just want you to restart your modem to "resolve the problem".

And it is all or none. If you fall on bad times and can't pay the subscription, you cannot have any books. Unlike your owned collection which you can reduce down to books you love. If you are low on cash, you cannot save and buy a book - you have to be subscribed all the time.

If subscription becomes the dominant mode of book consumption, it would be disastrous. As an add on service, it is nice. Especially in the areas without strong library systems.

I wish this feature would be available in Youtube and other video sites. I worked through half the Graphical Models course on Coursera at 1.5x and it was very comfortable. This would be a key feature to allow people to learn at their own pace. Literally.

This. Being a slow writer, it was a constant struggle for me through out school & college to keep pace with the instructors. I can imagine the same problem for the instructor as well - you need to be reasonably legible and fast to be able to cover everything.

On the other hand, I have often found PowerPoint based presentations to be boring and uninspiring. I remember a class on Thermodynamics from college that I found so boring for this reason that I nearly flunked it.

The best classes I have taken have been once which are primarily PowerPoint based with instructor jumping onto a whiteboard to flesh something out as required. PowerPoint provides the peace of mind that it will all be available if I need to refer to it later and working on whiteboard brings in the engagement and chance to go off track in between.

Retailer's purchase price is almost always a percentage of the cover price.

I am betting so are the searches on Google and sales of ebooks on Apple iStore for "1984". Oh the irony!

As per my understanding, two things drive the prices in the market. One is the perceived value the thing provides to users. This is the primary factor is the cost of producing the good is much lower when compared to perceived value. If the cost of production is high, there is usually a cost+ pricing.

One way competition reduces prices when sellers start undercutting each other in the first case. That doesn't apply to books in India. No one is making astronomical margins on books which can be cut down.

The other reason prices reduce is when competition leads to reducing production cost. It can be because of expanding market, technological improvements, improving supply chains.

Amazon may be able to make some difference in establishing better supply chains. But beyond that I do not see how they can help reduce the book prices in India. There has already been enough bloodbath in the online book retailing in India, so lack of competition is hardly an issue.

> (some) people negotiate all the corner cases in extreme detail, to the point where the law of diminishing returns kicks in pretty strongly.

I have seen that. I once negotiated a contract going back and forth over 2 months. The total business generated by that contract? 5000 INR. < 100 USD. (Of course, I didn't know that while negotiating the contract.)

I try not to do that now.

Disagreeing with someone is not the same as jumping on him! Did you find any of the replies personally insulting the person who raised the concerns? Or making fun of him or writing him off? If you did, that is precisely what the down vote is for. You will notice that the person raising the point was not downvoted into oblivion.

If it is nothing serious, please don't tell people to not go and participate in the board.

One of the biggest problems in building something on top of Drupal is the 2 year cycle of major releases with no backward compatibility. That means you will need to port all your custom code every 2 years. Combine that with the fact that many crucial modules are actually not part of the core distribution and are often not ported for months/years. Some less popular ones are even abandoned with new alternatives coming up. We went through that process of upgrading from D5 to D6 but simply gave up at the D6 - D7 transition.

There is tons of data on the govt websites in India and the only way to get to that is by scrapping the websites. Knowing that you can scrap it and be on your way feels very liberating at times. Example: Rates for Indian postal department services. Minutes of parliament houses. (great for building machine translation systems. A lot of research in MT has benefit from the availability of parallel corpus consisting of parliament proceedings in 2 or more languages. Hansard corpus from Canada. European Parliament corpus. No such luck in India.)

> Qyuki is hindi for "because" (usually spelled Kyunki and pronounced "Q"-"key")

A minor correction. The exact Hindi word for "because" is Qyunki (notice the 'n'). 'Qyun' => why. "ki" => that.

Here is a story from the other side. My wife writes and publishes business book summaries. She submitted about ten of those to be published on Kindle. Amazon happily published some of them in US market but decided that the content was "public domain" is other regions. Now I would have understood if they would have said "copyright violation" but "public domain"?

Our email correspondence with them was very similar to the one reported in the original post. They will repeat the original mail 2-3 times and will walk away after that leaving you with no answers.

AFAIK that is an emoticon based thing, not real sentiment analysis.

This is easily resolved. Did American education system or the education system of any other country which you consider developed now, underwent similar stages?

There are grave dangers in justifying our current systems and saying that in time, we will get there. For one, the products of this system may no longer wish for a better system to emerge.

They seem to be identifying and banning active bots. I don't think they worry about fake accounts that just sit around and follow others without generating a lot of tweets.

Seems like. From the post:

> All I did was change pricing for new customers in the backend and updated the marketing site to reflect the new pricing tiers.